The Rest Strike Back

Such conditions, however, hardly describe most stateless people or non-state actors today. For one thing, few non-Western societies remain nomadic. More important, those who do not share our values (since this is what we really mean by "non-Western") hold at least two increasingly powerful advantages.

First, they now know us better than we know them, and have penetrated our world far better than we have penetrated theirs. They understand very well indeed how our states and governments work.

Second, by definition, those who do not ascribe to Western values are not bound by our conventions and constraints. We may prevent them from indulging in cross-border invasions, but this only encourages them to discover new tactics, techniques and procedures that bypass overt conquest. Indeed, not abiding by our conventions frees them to engage in behavior that is not only reprehensible (by our standards), but, even more seriously, that defies easy redress. Here is where real innovation in the realm of warfare has occurred over the past several decades, and where our real challenges lie.

Consider, for instance, the phenomenon of child soldiers. Their prevalence across the African combat belt represents a completely organic development. John Garang reportedly began absorbing orphans into the Sudanese People's Liberation Army in the early 1980s. At first he offered them security, food and shelter in exchange for their help around camp. Before long he was using some as soldiers. Shortly thereafter, Youweri Mouseveni in Uganda also "discovered" orphans, whom he likewise turned into soldiers. Then, less than a decade after their appearance as combatants in Sudan, we find Charles Taylor (of Liberia) and Foday Sankoh (of Sierra Leone) pushing the use of eight, nine, ten and eleven year-olds toward the next logical step: murdering parents in order to create orphan children who can then be turned into soldiers.

If we could suspend our moral sensibilities for a moment, we might marvel at how imaginative people can be and note the horrible irony that has occurred. What some West Africans have achieved with child soldiers is something that Western researchers have sought for years: the Universal Soldier who needs little sleep, can withstand tremendous hardship, and is still able to fight. The fear among many military psychiatrists has been that even if pharmaceuticals could be developed to keep American military personnel awake and functioning, these drugs would rob them of their consciences, leaving us with super-soldiers as capable of committing atrocities as of being effective agents of state power. As it happens, this is a good description of what child soldiers are made to do--commit atrocities before they have matured enough to have developed consciences. In the process, of course, there is every likelihood they will never develop consciences, and will remain wedded to violence for life.

Child soldiers represent just one diabolically clever development that has been enabled by the death of conquest. As has been much remarked recently, suicide bombers who, while not children, are also not fully-formed adults, comprise another. They are utterly low-tech yet hugely effective. Indeed, how many billions have we spent on precision-guided smart weapons, compared to how little Hamas or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka has invested in martyr-based munitions delivery systems? The purposes of both systems are roughly similar, and both are, or can be, very effective. They differ, however, in one important regard: precision-guided munitions are technologically sophisticated, most being properly described by the phrase "fire and forget"; suicide bombers, in contrast, iconize memory. With photos of martyred bombers plastered all over bedroom and living room walls, who can forget?

Like orphans, alienated youth are an unintended but inevitable consequence of conflict. They may be slightly harder to "weaponize", but the fact that they can be used to target random civilians specifically, rain terror and recruit new martyrs all in one sets a whole new standard for military parsimony.

Terror has always been a fear multiplier, but over time people grow inured to chronic acts. For those wielding terror, then, surprise matters and novelty counts. Both can be achieved by varying the timing, location or scale of what is done. Al-Qaeda operatives could not bring down the World Trade Center towers with a method we have come to consider conventional--a car bomb. So they brought them down unconventionally, using our own airplanes. To do so they also hijacked assumptions about hijackings, which further indicates the distance we have traveled since militants first started taking over civilian aircraft in the early 1970s. Yet another novel trend was illustrated on September 11, 2001: no one claimed explicit credit for the attacks. Nor has anyone claimed responsibility for blowing up the Khobar Towers, or ramming the U.S.S. Cole, or setting off bombs in those Russian apartment complexes. Anonymity for attacks of this magnitude would have been unheard of and indeed unthinkable decades ago. But for those seeking to undermine and overwhelm rather than capture or seize, nothing makes more sense.

Other fairly recent practices represent the flip side of killing civilians anonymously. These include the use of civilians as human shields. In 1982 the PLO purposely put its anti-aircraft guns in apartment buildings in Beirut, thus turning local residents into safeguards for its weapons. In 1991 Saddam Hussein took Westerners hostage to shield certain sites. In both cases what was done was based on the premise that neither Israel nor the United States would knowingly sacrifice groups of civilians. Similarly, although scorched-earth tactics have been used since the advent of agriculture, Saddam Hussein clearly meant to offend our environmental sensibilities when he befouled the Persian Gulf; his intent was not just to cripple Kuwait financially, but to maximize a form of aesthetic shock.

Without question, such actions can be viewed as variations on old themes. In previous ages children were conscripted, hostages were taken, and Samson sacrificed himself to kill others. But the intent with which such things are done today suggests that more than just past practices are being violated. We are being violated. Western conventions regarding what should or should not be done in war are being consciously, purposely flouted.

At the same time, violence is not being put to quite the same uses it once was. When conquerors in the past laid waste entire communities and obliterated whole peoples, this was almost always done for its demonstration effect--to show others what would happen to them if they, too, refused to submit or chose to rebel. The aim was, still, to subjugate. Not so today, as we see most vividly with ethnic cleansing--itself a direct consequence of our anti-conquest sentiments. Not only did World War II finish off the colonial empires, much as World War I did the landed empires, but by 1945, with overt imperialism clearly on the way out, political and military entrepreneurs had to find new ways to secure loot and booty for their supporters. This was easy during the Cold War, when the United States and USSR (or their proxies) could be counted on as patrons. But when those sources of largesse dried up, leaders and aspiring leaders had to find alternative sources. Unable to invade or absorb other countries, they did what hard-pressed leaders have always done to generate wealth: cannibalize their own. They discovered they could "right" long-standing ethnic wrongs, create lebensraum, and liberate resources simply by getting rid of people from within their own borders--something Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe is only the most recent leader to do.

But there is also another way to interpret ethnic cleansing: as a "strategic improvement" on genocide. Unlike genocide, the aim of ethnic cleansing is to remove people, not to annihilate them. Even had the Nazis won World War II in Europe, they could not have rid the world of Jews; final solutions are impossible in a world of diasporas. Removal is easier than murder, and has been made easier still thanks to the existence of UNHCR, the corporatization of humanitarian relief, and the proliferation of governmental and non-governmental aid agencies. One of the most striking instances of a leader using relief to further his own ends occurred during the mid-1980s, when Ethiopia's Haile-Mariam Mengistu used feeding camps as traps. With families flooding in to receive famine relief, he was able to cull males from ethnic groups and factions he wished to suborn or eliminate. He did much of this with the tacit complicity of relief agencies that were much more anxious to maintain a presence in Ethiopia than to expose Mengistu's manipulation of them.

Learning Curves

Cunning people have always been able to turn adversity into advantage, as well as wring narrow opportunity from the best-intentioned acts of others. We often winked at this during the Cold War, when we viewed most conflict through communist/anti-communist and insurgency/counter-insurgency lenses. At the time, Marxist tactics received far more attention than did Maoist tactics, while we tended to consider tactics developed by anyone else as not tactics at all. We therefore learned nothing from militias in Lebanon or mujaheddin in Afghanistan, but, as we now know, others did. Take Velupillai Prabhakaran, long-time leader of the LTTE. Prabhakaran was so impressed with the damage done by the 1983 truck bomb in Lebanon that killed 241 U.S. Marines that he set about collecting enough explosives so that the LTTE could blow up a truck of its own in Sri Lanka, which it finally did in 1987. Over time, Prabhakaran progressed from suicide drivers to suicide bombers, and then to suicide boats. No one has done more with suicide tactics than he has, while others, in turn, seem to have learned from his example--as we saw with the U.S.S. Cole.

Essay Types: Essay