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Afghanistan: America’s War of Perception (from Policy Review)

Sunday, June 5th, 2011

In the days before he was forced into retirement by scandal, General Stanley McChrystal was fond of referring to the Afghan theater he commanded as a “war of perceptions.” In February he spoke to the Washington Post:

“This is all a war of perceptions,” McChrystal said on the eve of the Marja offensive. “This is all in the minds of the participants. Part of what we’ve had to do is convince ourselves and our Afghan partners that we can do this.”

McChrystal’s phrase — which, we will see, is a superficial interpretation of counterinsurgency theory — aligns regrettably well with the zeitgeist, particularly with what I will call “perspectival culture.”

Counterinsurgency theory, or coin, represents the extension to warfare of the same validation of the “eye of the beholder” that has characterized the arts and even aspects of the social sciences in the 20th century. This shift marks a departure from and constitutes a critique of an older, classical understanding of what it means to win or lose a battle or a war — indeed, about the nature of reality itself as externally given and immutable fact, as opposed to a social construction built of competing and shared “perceptions.” Although the critique has ample merit, as we shall see, it also poses underappreciated difficulties of its own.

I will argue that perspectival culture is so dominant today that it has led to a nearly uncritical embrace of “perception” as the heart of coin theory. The essential problem of coin theory, at least in its crude form (such as General McChrystal voices it), is its nonfalsifiability, the impossibility of phrasing it in ways which can be tested and disproved.
The dominance of perspectival culture has led to a nearly uncritical embrace of “perception” as the heart of COIN theory.

When scientists evaluate a new medicine, they want to see if it is better than a placebo at treating a disease. They test it accordingly, and the scientific community agrees that medications that don’t work aren’t brought to market. But coin advocates insist that perception, in this case the perception of the local population in a conflict area, is ultimately determinative of the success or failure of U.S. military operations. If bribing the villagers and spending billions on dubious training programs fails to produce security, coin advocates answer that we need more troops and money. They will not admit the possibility that the medicine does not work. And nonfalsifiable is a very dangerous thing for a military theory to be.

I have argued elsewhere that our strategy in Afghanistan is far from sound, indeed far from a strategy; that we are neglecting the political factors and following a “strategy of tactics” that will inexorably lead to an unnecessary, self-inflicted defeat. I have also argued that the American civilian and military leadership has been unfortunately reluctant to test our strategy by available metrics, insisting instead that we have not had enough time, or enough troops, to make it work. The understanding of counterinsurgency in the “war of perceptions” is a far cry from the unglamorous, common-sense measures that are recommended in the classic works by David Galula, Roger Trinquier, and Sir Robert Thompson that underlie the Counterinsurgency Field Manual supervised by General David Petraeus, “ fm 3–24.”

Or consider this excerpt from General Eisenhower’s 1945 manual, “Combating the Guerilla”:

The most effective means of defeating guerrilla activity is to cut them off physically and morally from the local inhabitants. While stern measures, such as curfew, prohibition of assembly, limitations of movement, heavy fines, forced labor, and the taking of hostages, may be necessary in the face of a hostile population, these measure must be applied so as to induce the local inhabitants to work with the occupying forces. A means of bringing home to the inhabitants the desirability of cooperating with the forces of occupation against the guerrillas is the imposition of restrictions on movement and assembly and instituting search operations with the area affected.

Counterinsurgency operations, like any other military activity, should be judged on their merits. And counterinsurgency has worked in some times and places, though not under conditions acceptable to the current American population (Algeria, the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, the Sri Lankan struggle against the ltte). Even during our own Civil War and Reconstruction, federal commanders treated American citizens with harsh measures that would never have passed muster in Iraq in 2006. In 1868, an Army commander took Ku Klux Klan sympathizers hostage to prevent an assault on Augusta, Georgia. In 1863, Northern troops forcibly resettled relatives of the insurgents in Missouri who were attacking towns in Kansas.

There are ways of measuring whether counterinsurgency operations are working, besides the elusive perceptions of the population. Economists look at the price of transportation, travel data, crop prices, and other variables to try to devise objective measures of effectiveness. They also look at simple measures of violence like ied attacks and assassinations. The problem is that many in the top leadership don’t seem to be interested in what these metrics tell them. The coarse “war of perceptions” gloss on contemporary coin theory encourages a lack of interest in metrics and an emphasis on rhetoric instead.

The metrics of the Afghan war continue to deteriorate under the banner of coin, and yet Petraeus, who replaced McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan, has recently assured the American public that our strategy is basically sound. While Petraeus is a very capable general who understands the difficulty and subtleties of counterinsurgency as McChrystal did not, he too appears to be trapped in a conceptual dead end.

Understanding the intellectual history and context of coin helps to turn it from an article of faith to the mere doctrine it is, so that it can be criticized, improved, amended, or abandoned as needed. We are, after all, in Afghanistan to win, not to serve a theory.

For the rest of the article, please see:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/80071

Posted in Afghanistan, Music and Cultural Criticism, Perspectival Culture and COIN | No Comments »

Bohemian Rhapsody (orig. published in The Weekly Standard, 4/18/2011)

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

Bohemian Rhapsody
A backward look at the Manhattan hipster life.
Ann Marlowe
April 18, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 30

Art and Madness
A Memoir of Lust Without Reason
by Anne Roiphe
Nan A. Talese, 240 pp., $24.95

Seventy-five-year-old Anne Roiphe’s short, incandescent fourth memoir doesn’t read like an older writer’s book, but it explores obsessively an archaic constellation of ideas: that there’s something special about artists and writers that excuses their moral lapses, especially in the arenas of alcoholism and adultery.

“I believed that I was going to be a muse to a man of great talent,” she intones, and she might as well be saying she dreamt of being a lady in waiting at the court of Louis XIV, it is so remote to the present day. “Alcohol was the lubricant of genius .  .  . the men needed to drink.” In sentences that alternate between Hemingwayesque brusqueness and Woolfian rhapsodies, Roiphe offers short set pieces anchored mainly in New York and the Hamptons from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. At the time, the United States still had a nearly official culture, with a hierarchy of writers (almost all white and male) whose relative rank order everyone knew. In Roiphe’s account, they partied furiously, often at the Sutton Place apartment of the Paris Review cofounder George Plimpton.

Maybe the nonstop drinking and adultery she participated in was possible because writing was a reasonably paid enterprise, or because many of the Paris Review crowd—Peter Matthiessen, Doc Humes, Plimpton himself—were trustafarians. Some were also highly productive; Roiphe has bested most by publishing three earlier memoirs as well as nine novels and six works of nonfiction, while raising three daughters.

I caught the end of the Paris Review parties in George Plimpton’s place in the late nineties. Coming from the indie rock scene, as I did, the substance abuse and sexual charge seemed mild. So did the intellectual stimulation and literacy level. But Roiphe has a skilled eye in evoking what were obviously the times of her young life, and whether or not it was any more exciting than literary life today, she makes it seem that way.

Art and Madness—a terrible title, at once pretentious and sententious—is also, more sadly, the story of Roiphe’s doomed starter marriage (1958-63) to a delusional alcoholic, Jack Richardson. Roiphe met Richardson at a Brearley dance at 15, re-met him at the West End Bar at 21 (she says she was 19 in the text, but it’s a mistake), and married him at 22. The second time they saw each other, Richardson asked her to buy a drink for him. While they were living together in Paris, he went out alone most nights, drinking and picking up hookers while she typed his manuscripts. And then, finally, he asked her to marry him. The reader can guess which way this is going, but Roiphe couldn’t:

My father gives Jack a few hundred dollars for a honeymoon. .  .  . But after lunch .  .  . Jack says he needs the money for a few nights on the town by himself. He needs to drink. I understand. He goes off alone on our honeymoon and I wait at the apartment. He comes back four days later.

Roiphe worked as a typist in the day to support Jack writing his first play, then typed it in the evening while he went out drinking. Roiphe, whose second husband was a psychoanalyst, is aware enough to say of her choices, “It has a name in the psychiatric manuals: masochism.” But she insists that was not all: “A passion that even as I know better, even as I now regret it, was not without its own grandeur.” We have only Roiphe’s word to take for Richardson being a brilliant writer, since no one today has heard of him. Roiphe doesn’t mention the irony, but the best way to turn up the right Jack Richardson on a search engine today is to couple his name with hers. And this is a man who vowed that, if he were not as famous as Keats by Keats’s age at death (25), he would kill himself.

Speaking of which, there is no bohemian poverty in this tale. Roiphe and Richardson were living on Park Avenue when she was 27, in an apartment bought by her rich mother. When Richardson needed more money for drinking than Roiphe’s meager salary as a receptionist allowed, he pawned her jewelry or she borrowed from her mother. The folie à deux that constituted this marriage might have ended even sooner without Roiphe’s family money, which she wrote about in her second memoir, the excellent 1185 Park Avenue. Roiphe is unflinching about her limitations: “I want a better world. I just want someone else to create it. .  .  . I had the morals of a four year old. .  .  . The man was a snake charmer and I was a snake.” She rationalized her many affairs with married men in the desperate interval between Richardson’s departure and her second marriage. Because her husband was compulsively unfaithful, she was freed not only from her marriage vows but from her obligation to respect others’ vows:

If other women had my husband, I too could do as I pleased. .  .  . In other words I was unmoored, uncertain and violated the only religious precept I really believed: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

She attributes her bad behavior to not knowing “whether it was better to snatch what sex one could from passersby or to remain faithful to a love and miss the party.” She never attributes it to the sense of artistic entitlement that the male writers she knew used to excuse their lapses—though she believed in this justification, too.

Roiphe found happiness with husband number two, Dr. Herman Roiphe, a much steadier model, who was 43 to her 31 when they wed and stayed married to her until he died 38 years later. (She wrote a memoir about that, too.) In the end, though, what haunts this book are not the wild parties and furtive adulteries but the unconsoled screams of the very young Emily Carter, Roiphe’s daughter by Richardson, wailing as her beautiful mother walks out the door, often on a foolish mission: “How hard it must be to be this child, whose mother is about to put her, still in her pajamas, in the car and race to the bus stop for a last goodbye.” Roiphe was going to say farewell to a visiting lover, the late Doc Humes, possibly as alcoholic and mentally ill as Richardson, and today nearly as obscure.

Roiphe’s first daughter is referred to only as “the baby” or “the child.” At the end, Roiphe mentions Carter’s struggles with drugs, her HIV-positive status, and her having become a writer, but still without naming her. Of course, Carter, a fixture of the East Village literary scene, may have requested this anonymity. (The other daughters are Katie, who wrote this book’s forward, and Becky, both from their mother’s second marriage.) And maybe the best commentary on the harrowing marriage that produced her comes from a 1998 interview with Carter. She is reflecting on her years as a stripper, but her words apply to the repetitions of her parents’ union, and her father’s alcoholism, as well:

If I were ruler of this, our darkly gleaming universe .  .  . I’d make it a felony to change any human interaction into something reeking of power and degradation. I’d make it illegal to turn your life into an endless behavioral reply, like a skipping record, of something that happened to you as a child.

Posted in Music and Cultural Criticism, Women, money and power / the social side of economics | No Comments »

Face of Libya’s Revolution (orig. published in Daily Beast, 4/18/11)

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-18/libya-revolution-the-young-bohemian-face-of-the-uprising-in-benghazi/#

The Face of Libya’s Revolution

by Ann Marlowe

It’s not a freedom fighter atop a tank but a young bohemian woman in Benghazi reviving a carnival banned by Gaddafi and singing songs of protest. Ann Marlowe reports on an extraordinary utopian moment in the free city.

The most interesting news here in Free Libya isn’t war but peace—and cultural vitality. Signs everywhere say, “We began it peacefully and we will end it peacefully,” and the utopian social transformation is much more interesting than the stalemated war.

The front line was here on March 19, when Gaddafi’s troops and lijan thureah, or local revolutionary committees, killed fighters defending the city. And on the 20th, they deliberately struck civilians, sometimes aiming RPGs at family cars. Dr. Hajer al Jahmi, 27, a third-year emergency medicine resident at Benghazi Medical Center, saw a huge sack of human body parts brought into the ER.

But just a few weeks later, resilient twentysomething Libyans, almost all of them working outside their professional fields, have created an embryonic civil society and culture. The shabbab cool, or cool youth, who gave the Revolution of February 17 much of its visual flavor—the witty signs like “NATO Air: Just Do It”; the homemade T-shirts and caps—have turned their energies to writing, photography, documentary filmmaking, and rock ‘n’ roll. Their inspirations and style come from global youth culture—everyone is on Facebook and Twitter—but their seriousness of purpose and maturity reflect the trauma their city recently endured.

While American TV coverage of Libya favors savage-looking freedom fighters yelling on captured tanks, the face of the revolution here in Benghazi, 200 kilometers from the stalemated front line and 700 kilometers from besieged Misrata, is young women like Shadda Hatem el Majri, a 19-year-old university student from Tripoli whose family left for Benghazi a few days after February 17 so that they could be part of the activity.

On April 17, Shadda was one of hundreds of women in Benghazi who participated in an abbreviated observance of the traditional “Flower Carnival,” which Gaddafi banned in 1986. Even as Gaddafi’s troops continued to send cluster bombs into Misrata, women paraded through Benghazi to Freedom Square holding flowers.

The shabbab cool include an architect who sings in rock bands, an architecture student who used to rap, and a civil-engineering student who works on a new weekly magazine.

The blooms the women carried were neither abundant or particularly fresh, but the meaning was clear. Shadda explained to me in perfect English, and without a trace of irony, that she and the other young women gave flowers to any men that they saw with weapons. A talented singer, she’d spent the afternoon rehearsing “Free Libya,” a folksong with English lyrics that some of her friends are planning to videotape.

The building where they practice formerly housed an official cultural council headed by a woman in the Gaddafi inner circle. Now it’s home to a number of collectives. One maintains the bilingual Web TV channel Libya Al Hurra, started by Mohammed Nabous, 28, who was shot in the head as he reported on March 19. One group makes movies; Ali Sirayes and a few other young filmmakers are making documentaries “from the first minute of the revolution” onward. Another publishes a slender Arabic-English magazine, Berenice Post, every Monday, pitched at the city’s bilingual elite.

Some of the same writers contribute to the other weekly produced here, Sourat Kul Al Shabab, or The Voice of All the Youth, Arabic-only and more populist. Mohamed Shembesh explained to me that the collective that puts it out chooses a different editor every one or two issues. Just as radically, Sourat accepts articles via a dropbox in Freedom Square. There’s no postal service in Libya, and the Internet has been disrupted because of the war, so this is the best way to get contributions.

This revolution began in the most bourgeois way possible, with a peaceful protest in front of Benghazi’s courthouse, or makama, on February 17 by a lawyers’ guild. Gaddafi’s forces used violence, and the youth joined in. By the 19th, the goal was regime change. Because Gaddafi dug in, the revolutionaries defended themselves. But the astounding fact of bringing down the government here pales beside the utopian moment.

The courthouse area is now known as Freedom Square, and it’s a revolutionary fair of nonstop activity, with booths offering literature on a dozen causes, songs playing from loudspeakers, and dozens, often hundreds of Libyans walking about, reveling in their new public space. There’s a civility rare in the Arab street, and I’ve walked alone as late as 11 at night without harassment.

Money almost isn’t necessary. There are limits on bank withdrawals, as most people worked for the state and were paid from Tripoli by direct deposit. So shopkeepers often charge only their cost for food items, young people give out free sandwiches and espresso, and local mobile phone calls are free since the phone network, once owned by the Gaddafi family, was hacked a few weeks ago.
A former legal office building around the corner from the makama has been renamed the Media Center, and it’s filled with excited young men and women artists and activists. Some work on a charity, Ani Ensahn, or I Am Human, which provides social services to 200 families displaced by the war. Behind a graffiti-covered door marked “GUG Guys Underground,” young men practice rock guitar or play the traditional stringed instrument of Libya, the oud. They include 15-year-old Tawfik Ben Saud, a 6-foot-tall self-taught video maker and photographer, and a 15-year-old rock guitarist, Ziad, whose mother is English. One of their friends, Rami el Kalih, was murdered by the lijan thureah on March 20.

Three stories of the Media Center’s hallways are covered with huge black-and-white political cartoons, lots of punk-inflected signs expressing love of country and the revolution, and a few urging the revolutionaries not to smoke. In a country where chain-smoking is epidemic and people routinely light up in cars and restaurants, perhaps the most unusual aspect of the shabbab cool is how many don’t smoke.

Most are from well-off families, like many young bohemians in the U.S. That’s why they have up-to-date laptops, iPhones, good cameras, and access to cars to get around this sprawling city. Many have studied overseas—the University of Manchester is a favorite—and some have one foreign parent or have lived abroad. The young men of the Media Center and Libya Al Hurra look like hipster youth anywhere in the U.S. or Europe, their style influenced by skateboard culture, though I’ve yet to see a skateboard here. The young women are more modestly dressed, wearing jeans with tunics or trench coats, many but not all in headscarves.

Their clothes are a bit drab. Benghazi, a crumbling harbor town of 800,000 situated on a beautiful bay, is no shopping paradise and Libyans—influenced, some say, by Bedouin culture—are as unmaterialistic a lot as I’ve seen. But they jazz up their look with a red, black, and green wristband, button, cap, or T-shirt—the original 1951 independence flag of Libya. Even the most arty kids, like Shadda, talk spontaneously about how much they now love their country and its flag, after years of being ashamed of being Libyan.

Before the revolution of February 17, there wasn’t much to do in Benghazi. There are sad, Spartan stores, endless rundown espresso cafes, and just a handful of attractive restaurants. There are no bars (or alcohol), nightclubs, concert halls, theaters, or art galleries, just an outdoor restaurant complex called Sendibad that offered live music occasionally. One could drink coffee—and Libyans drink it all day—or walk along the spectacular corniche. Or one could stay at home and watch satellite TV, where Libyans learned of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt that inspired them, or go online.

Gaddafi wanted it that way; as Dirk Vanderwalle notes in one of his two seminal works on modern Libya, Gaddafi’s early rule featured “the burning of Western books and musical instruments, the closing of nightclubs, the promotion of traditional Libyan dress… and the renaming of the Gregorian calendar.”

Grimmer yet, many Libyans live at home well into their twenties, single. A young writer at the Media Center, Mohamed Al Burk, explains, “People wait to marry because they have no money. It costs 10,000 dinars for a wedding and 25,000 to 30,000 for a flat. Multiply by .70 to get the dollar amount.” It’s hard to save with a 350-dinar-a-month salary. And there’s no dating or mixed-gender parties.

Under Gaddafi, there was no such thing as an independent artist or filmmaker or musician or novelist. The kinds of people who would become artists or writers in other countries became academics here, but not necessarily in fields related to their real passion. The shabbab cool include an architect who sings in rock bands (Husain Kablan), an architecture student who used to rap (Lou’I Hatem El Magri, Shadda’s older brother), and a civil-engineering student who works on a new weekly magazine (Mohamed Shembesh).

Shadda, who also takes photos and had a solo show of her paintings in Cairo at age 15, is crossing a big boundary with her gentle folk music. A woman singer appearing on a video is a big deal in this country, where even some male musicians—like one of the members of Guys Underground—worry that appearing in a music video might be haram.

The tension between fundamentalist and moderate ideas is real here, though so far it is being negotiated with words, not violence. And there are questions about the re-integration into a new order of Gaddafi loyalists. Twenty-five-year-old Amal El Gahani, a tall, gregarious electrical-engineering professor turned activist, estimates that 30 percent to 40 percent of the population even in Benghazi was involved with the lijan thureah. But so far, young women like Amal and Shadda suggest that the Revolution of February 17 has the power to create a new culture in Libya.

Posted in Libya, Music and Cultural Criticism, The Arab Revolt, Islam, Iraq War, War on Terror | No Comments »

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