Apr
19
2010
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Understanding the Insurgent Motive |
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Written by JD Johannes
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Monday, 19 April 2010 |
[Preface: This article is going to get me in trouble with people who do not read it and slowly and digest it.
Gunmen, fighters, insurgents--whatever you want to call them--are not complicated people to understand. Understanding them will go a long way to determining success or failure in Afghanistan and other war torn regions.
I have bumped into several insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan over the years and understand their motives.
I understand them because in a few ways I am like them.]
"It is the best life on earth!"
Omar Hammami, Somali Insurgent
It was an exhileration I dare not try to match. I was driving down the interstate way too fast, the music playing way too loud as I headed toward home. The thrill was not from being back in the United States, but the realization I had just survived the most improbable adventure.
Less than 24 hours earlier I had been in Kabul, Afghanistan. In the previous weeks I went from trudging around the mountains with US Army Infantrymen to staying in a five-star hotel.
I lived the life described by Omar Hammami to his sister and published in the New York Times magazine .
"Sometimes I live in the bush with camels, sometimes I live the five-star life. Sometimes I walk for miles in the terrible heat with no water, sometimes I ride in extremely slick cars. Sometimes I’m chased by the enemy, sometimes I chase him!”
“I have hatred, I have love,” he [Hammami] went on. “It’s the best life on earth!”
Hammami was raised in Alabama and joined the Somali muslim insurgents where he found his identity and embraced the lifestyle of the gunman, the fighter, the insurgent.
War has a powerful effect on the psyche. The Hebrew military theorist Martin van Crevald writes of the effect, "By compelling the senses to focus themselves on the here and now [war] can cause a man to take his leave of them."
It is an exhilerating nothingness that is addictive to some.
"Just as it makes no sense to ask 'why people eat' or 'what they sleep for', so fighting in many ways is not a means but an end," van Crevald writes in his book 'The Transformation of War.'
"For every person who has expressed his horror of war there is another who found in it the most marvelous of all the experiences that are vouchsafed to man, even to the point that he later spent lifetime boring his descendants by recounting his exploits."
A fighter like Hammami finds a narcotic reality to war that cannot be found in any other form.
I have felt that powerful narcotic as well in the dusty villages of Al Anbar, streets of Baghdad and valleys of Afghanistan.
Asking an insurgent who is hooked on it to quit is like telling an addict to 'just say no.'
For many insurgents, the fight is a step-up in the world from subsitence farming or urban poverty. It also brings with it the most powerful force in human nature, the top of Maslows Heirarchy--self actualized identity.
“Out there I’m a useless guy, unemployed and cursed by my family,” one militant said. “Here I’m a commander. My words have weight.”
Pakistani counterterrorism officials say memebers of the Taliban describe the fight as "an addiction, a habit that made them feel powerful in a world that ignored them."
A young man from Peshwar, or Khandahar or Jalalabad with few prospects finds not only employment as a fighter, but purpose and status.
This is what van Crevald is referring to as as fighting as an end in and of itself.
This is also where my similarities with the insurgent end. I have experienced the dark elixer of combat and all-in adventures. When they are placed in front of me it is impossible for me to say 'no.' But for me being in harms way is not an end to itself.
I have a life and an identity in the United States aside from the war. I do not wholly define myself by my overseas adventures. They are a part of my identity, but they are not my sole identity.
The insurgent cadre define their identity by being a fighter. To them, there is no better life or option and if they become addicted to the exhilerating nothingness, very little of civil life will hold much appeal to them.
Many of the low-level fighters can be peeled off with simple options like a job. In Iraq, being paid by the coalition to staff a check point was a better option than being an insurgent.
The upper level commanders and leadership are more difficult if not impossible to mollify, but the mid-level leaders are the key.
The mid-level leaders will not go back to the farm or the urban poverty of Khandahar or be satisfied with standing around at a check point. But they may trade positions , like former members of the Lords Army in central Africa who have joined with the Ugandan military.
The mid-level cadre will want similar positions to satisfy their ego and maintain their identity. They will want to maintain their status and occasionally get the exhileration of the nothingness of combat.
Those who are truly devoted to the cause of Islam will never be peeled off, but most fighters, even those who are devout muslims, can be flipped. The die-hards, those committed to the cause or whose identities are fully invested in the cause, can only be slowly hunted down an eliminated.
Understanding the insurgent is not difficult. They are human and respond to the same motivations as every other human.
Flipping insurgents is just one line of effort among many and to flip an insurgent you must understand his motives for being an insurgent.
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