Irregular War

The New Threat from the Margins

Paul Rogers

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

If the rise of Islamic State can overthrow powerful states in a matter of weeks, what kind of a secure future can the world expect? After more than a decade of the war on terror, security specialists thought that Islamist paramilitary movements were in decline; the threat from ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Qaida in Yemen, the chaos in Libya and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan have all shown that to be wishful thinking. Once again the West is at war in the Middle East.

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World Order or Disorder: ISIS and New Drivers of Conflict

By February 2006, almost three years after the coalition invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, the US Army was embroiled in a bitter insurgency, primarily against Sunni rebels who looked back to the Saddam Hussein era with pride and saw the American soldiers as occupiers of their state. One of the American reporters embedded with US units as they tried to quell the rebellion was an experienced journalist, Tom Lasseter, who was working at the time for Knight Ridder Newspapers. He was with the 101st Airborne Division when one unit was ambushed near the River Tigris at Samarra, north of Baghdad. After a violent confrontation in which several of the rebels were killed, he reported what happened next:

Staff Sgt. Cortez Powell looked at the shredded jaw of a dead man whom he’d shot in the face when insurgents ambushed an American patrol in a blind of reeds. Powell’s M4 assault rifle had jammed, so he’d grabbed the pump-action shotgun that he kept slung over his shoulders and pulled the trigger.

Five other soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division scrambled down, pulled two of the insurgents’ bodies from the reeds and dragged them through the mud.

‘Strap those motherf——s to the hood like a deer,’ said Staff Sgt. James Robinson, 25, of Hughes, Ark.

The soldiers heaved the two bodies onto the hood of a Humvee and tied them down with a cord. The dead insurgents’ legs and arms flapped in the air as the Humvee rumbled along.

Iraqi families stood in front of the surrounding houses. They watched the corpses ride by and glared at the American soldiers.1

This incident illustrates a fundamental difference of positions. For US soldiers, the violent urban insurgency that had emerged in Iraq was by enemies that were terrorists, pure and simple. The United States had gone to war three years before because Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), supported terrorism, was in some way linked to the 9/11 attacks and could, in the future, provide terrorists with those WMD. From the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers in the US Army, 9/11 was, after all, an appalling attack on the world’s greatest state – a powerful force for good for the whole world and a democracy in every sense. Strapping ‘those motherf——s to the hood like a deer’ and parading them through the town was a necessary example to deter a very dangerous enemy that threatened not just the United States but the peace of the whole world.

The feelings of those Iraqis who ‘watched the corpses ride by and glared at the American soldiers’ would have been completely different. Even though Iraq had fought a damaging war against Iran in the 1980s and had been repelled when it invaded Kuwait in 1990, in his 25-year rule Saddam Hussein had still presided over the development of a modern state with enviable education and health services and an economy strong enough to survive the sanctions of the 1990s. The regime drew its strength from the Sunni minority, including many of the people around Samarra, and for them the young men who had been fighting the Americans were heroic defenders of the country against a foreign invasion. To see them treated like sporting trophies was an atrocity, one that would serve to turn those watching into even stronger supporters of the insurgency and haters of America.

That episode near Samarra gives some clue to the clash of narratives that underpins so much of the conflict that has evolved since 9/11: in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and, more recently, Syria and Iraq once again. Moreover, this clash persists and is likely to do so for many years to come, because although al-Qaeda is less prominent than it was, the rise of ISIS since 2012 has prompted a vigorous response from the United States and its partners across much of the Middle East. It is thus essential to explore this clash, and not only in terms of the events of the past couple of decades, since it is a problem that stretches back very many years.

Furthermore, the experience of the years since 2001 and the War on Terror has a significance that goes far beyond the immediate conflict with al-Qaeda and ISIS and extends to a much more fundamental issue: whether or not that war can provide us with some indication of the global and long-term trends in insecurity that face us.

The argument

After 15 years of the War on Terror, there have been more than 250,000 people killed, principally in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the majority of them civilians. The bitter civil war in Syria has been at least as costly, yet the Assad regime is mentioned far less as a target for regime termination as it successfully plays on the West’s greater fear of ISIS. To add to Western concerns, ISIS is now gaining support from other militant movements: in North Africa, Nigeria, Afghanistan, the Caucasus and even South Asia. Al-Qaeda may have been eclipsed, but extreme jihadist movements are growing. They are the focus of attention in international security circles and the subjects of many books and articles, and seemingly now form the greatest cause for concern.

This book takes a different view and sees ISIS and related movements as part of a much wider phenomenon: what might loosely be called ‘revolts from the margins’. It does not regard Islam as the fundamental issue for the coming decades and is more concerned with the risk that we are moving into an ‘age of insurgencies’ – rather than one of a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the West and the Islamic world – and towards a global environment of fragility, instability, increasing violence and irregular war. This can be avoided, but not if the world’s elites, and especially the states of the North Atlantic community, continue with their posture of maintaining control by traditional means.

The conventional view, following the expansion of the air war with ISIS, is that stable, Western states face a threat from extreme Islamists, principally embodied in ISIS, but with strong elements across many countries: from sub-Saharan Africa right through the Middle East and on to South and South East Asia. This threat may not yet be existential but, in this view, requires forceful and persistent action, no longer with tens of thousands of boots on the ground, because of the problems that arose in Iraq and Afghanistan, but by means of remote control, including air strikes, armed drones, special forces, private militaries and other ‘below the radar’ methods.

Given time and commitment, this approach, the argument goes, will work: advanced states will remain secure; the neo-liberal free-market system will ensure that wealth will permeate downwards; the United States and its allies will lead the way, and ISIS and its ilk will slowly wither away. As for climate change and all the other ‘red/green’ issues, even now the view among many Western opinion formers and politicians is that people will come to their senses and see them as annoying diversions from the road to neo-liberal progress.

This book will argue that although ISIS is certainly a major security problem, the real drivers of current global insecurity are quite different: deepening socio-economic divisions, which lead to the relative marginalisation of most people across the world, and the prospect of profound and lasting environmental constraints, caused by climate change. ISIS, in short, should be seen as a warning of what could be to come, not as a fundamental trend in its own right. The geographer and politician Edwin Brooks argued more than 40 years ago that what we had to avoid was a dystopian future of a ‘crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force and endlessly threatened by desperate men in the global ghettoes’.2

These fundamental drivers of conflict – economic marginalisation and climate change – are exacerbated by two other factors. One is that a whole raft of welcome improvements in education and literacy is making far more people aware of their own marginalisation and unwilling to accept it, and the other is that there is an assumption in the West that security can best be assured, when other methods fail, by resort to military responses. This is greatly aided by the power and influence of what President Eisenhower called in 1961 the ‘military–industrial complex’, but is better described as the ‘military–industrial–academic–bureaucratic complex’. At its crudest level, what is sometimes termed the ‘control paradigm’ might better be termed ‘liddism’: keeping the lid on problems rather than understanding their causes and manifestations.

The argument in this book is that ISIS is an example of a revolt from the margins, one initially specific to the Middle East but with much wider implications. Other examples include Islamist militant groups Boko Haram and the al-Nusra Front, but also the little-recognised but highly significant neo-Maoist Naxalite rebellion in India, as well as, in the recent past, the neo-Maoists in Nepal and the Shining Path movement in Peru. All in their different ways are indicators of the problems likely to be faced if that ‘crowded glowering planet’ is allowed to come into being. There are ways to stop it, but they go far beyond conventional thinking on security.

We will examine some of those ways in the final chapters, but our earlier concern is with how we got to where we are, not with where we might go. Why was the Western response to 9/11 so counter-productive, even leading to the emergence of ISIS? Why is there a persistent clash of narratives between Western states, with their innate belief that they are the civilised ‘good guys’, and so much of the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East, which takes a radically different view? Is there really a risk of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons being developed by extreme groups? How has ISIS developed and what are the underlying reasons for its gaining so much support? Is it a forerunner of the kinds of movement that are likely in the future? Finally, if we do face a ‘new world disorder’, how do we prevent it and use a combination of human ingenuity and wisdom to make serious progress towards a more peaceful, stable and sustainable world? If a good definition of prophecy is ‘suggesting the possible’, what ‘prophecy’ is already out there pointing the way?

Where we are coming from

In the 18 months from mid-October 2001 to April 2003, the United States and its coalition partners fought two brief and intense wars, one against the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda paramilitaries in Afghanistan and the other against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Both seemed remarkably successful – the Taliban regime was terminated and al-Qaeda dispersed in barely eight weeks, and the Iraqi regime collapsed in only three – and from a Washington perspective both were fully appropriate responses to the appalling atrocities of the 9/11 attacks.

By mid-April 2003, the Bush administration could look forward to radical political and economic change in Iraq, which would lead to a remaking of the Middle East, together with a pro-Western Afghanistan in Central Asia, curbing Chinese and Russian ambitions. More importantly, Iran, the most dangerous threat to Western interests as seen from Washington, would now be restrained by a formidable US military presence in Afghanistan to the east and Iraq to the west, pro-Western states across the Persian Gulf to the south-west and the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet controlling the Gulf itself and the Arabian Sea. Iran would be surrounded, enveloped and contained.

A decade and a half later the situation looks very different. Iran is a far more influential country and is even developing better links with the United States, while Western militaries have repeatedly tried to retreat from Afghanistan, leaving a fractured country bending to substantial Taliban influence. The termination of the Gaddafi regime in Libya has left a violent, fragmented and deeply unstable country, and across south-western Asia and sub-Saharan Africa other Islamist movements, such as Boko Haram, are gaining power and territory. Iraq has been beset by violence and, above all, an extreme Islamist movement has risen from the remains of al-Qaeda to gain territory across both that country and Syria.

The sudden rise of ISIS, the most feared of the current group of Islamist paramilitary movements, in early 2014 has been the most substantial surprise. The movement’s development has a significance that goes far further than the immediate wars: it is a symptom of a wider phenomenon, a clear indicator of future conflicts that will have a worldwide relevance. It represents a type of movement that will become more common over the next two or three decades: a revolt from the margins within a global system experiencing a series of drivers of conflict that will dominate international relations unless the underlying factors are faced squarely. To appreciate how and why this has happened requires us to look back at the motivations for the 9/11 attacks, and the reasons that Western states responded with wars that went well beyond the termination of the movement responsible.

Moreover, even if it eventually goes into decline, ISIS marks the emergence of a kind of paramilitary movement that is sufficiently experienced and robust to withstand the efforts of the world’s most advanced militaries to contain it. It is also an example of a movement that may use a variety of forms of hybrid and asymmetric warfare, and that may seek to produce chemical, biological or radiological (CBR) weapons.

Perhaps most significantly of all, and at the heart of the problem for the West, ISIS actually seeks confrontation with powerful states as it tries to position itself not as a pariah but as a champion, with its ability to win hearts and minds and to present itself as the defender of Islam making it particularly dangerous. The very idea that this could have traction seems hugely far-fetched to Western thinking, yet that is precisely the situation. Revolts from the margins may be seen as minor irritants, but if ‘the margins’ represent the majority of people in a country, a region or even a continent, the resultant movements should not be regarded lightly.

Given the prominence of Islamist paramilitary movements in the early twenty-first century, there is an understandable tendency to see them as the only examples of violent revolts, but this is far from the case. In the past 30 years alone many other movements have been in evidence, including the Basque-separatist organisation ETA in Spain, the Provi...

Table of contents

• Preface to the New Edition
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 • World Order or Disorder: ISIS and New Drivers of Conflict
• 2 • Coming Out of Nowhere
• 3 • Conflicting Narratives and an Environment for Revolt
• 4 • Weapons of Mass Destruction and Political Violence
• 5 • ISIS and Its Future
• 6 • Irregular War
• 7 • A Glowering Planet?
• 8 • A Possible Peace
• Notes
• Select Bibliography