The title of Theo Farrell’s excellent recent work – Unwinnable: The British Campaign in Afghanistan 2001–14 – sums up the NATO campaign in Helmand in suitably blunt terms.2 Responsibility for this unfortunate state of affairs, argues Farrell, lay at the hands of a number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Endemic corruption on the part of the Afghan government which denied it the legitimacy required to displace public support for the Taliban insurgency was one. The proximity of Pakistan, which allowed its Taliban clients the time and space to regroup and direct their campaign largely free from interference, was another. And then of course there was the Western public’s tiring of the war which eventually in 2010 led to NATO politicians setting a deadline to end the ISAF presence in Afghanistan by 2014 (an aspiration that was inevitably derailed). When compounded by what Farrell saw as the final critical weakness, namely a fundamental inability on the part of Western actors to properly understand the conflict dynamics at play in Helmand, coalition success became impossible. Farrell’s diagnosis of these fundamental causes of failure, particularly those relating to Afghan government corruption, the support provided to the Taliban by Pakistan, and Western public fatigue with a seemingly unending war, are supported by numerous other analyses.

Despite the advances made by social science as an aid to colonial control during the early twentieth century, one of the most revealing case studies of imperial ‘understanding’ in action during this period comes not from Africa, where trained ‘anthropologists’ had become part of the British colonial government’s administrative repertoire. Instead it came from the isolated and violent enclave of the North-West Frontier, where ‘classical’ forms of knowledge-gathering continued to dominate up to and post-World War II. Here was a hotbed of government activism, where officials sought to actively manipulate and shape local social and political structures in the pursuit of peace and stability.1 Ostensibly focused upon keeping tribal resistance to imperial rule at palatable levels through cost-effective administration, in reality these actions hid determined attempts by officials of the Indian Political Service – the so-called politicals – to effect transformative change upon aspects of native Pashtun society.

In 2006 a novel and highly publicised evolution in military affairs emerged at the hands of US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Functioning under the moniker of the Human Terrain System (HTS), it promised a fundamentally different way of approaching the perennial problem of countering violent insurgency and so establishing the conditions required for security, stability and the sorts of political change ultimately envisaged by the United States and its coalition partners. Operating as part of a radically redesigned population-centric COIN doctrine, the HTS sought to present US forces (and those of its allies) with a highly informed understanding of the structures, sentiments, loyalties and designs of the local population among whom coalition forces operated. This, it was believed, comprised perhaps the most decisive audience when seeking to win the COIN battle. Anthropologists, ethnographers and other social scientists operating in the field would provide military commanders with the necessary insights to more surgically tailor their efforts to understanding the local population, thereby enabling that vital constituency to be more accurately factored into tactical actions and operational designs. The emphasis behind this evolution was clear. Understanding the environment one operates in and in particular its socio-political structures and its ‘human terrain’ is a fundamental ingredient of success in any COIN campaign, stabilisation operation or expeditionary intervention. As the celebrated COIN expert David Kilcullen stated, there could be no substitute for analysis provided by ‘extremely deep local area and cultural knowledge’.

The Human Terrain System. Modern population-centric COIN doctrine. The ‘Big Data’ phenomenon. All of these things reflect a similar preoccupation, namely the need to develop forms of understanding that can provide outsiders with influence and control over a resistant society or elements therein, and which allow relatively small numbers of counterinsurgents to deliver ‘stability’. Yet despite the modern terminology and the association with largely twenty-first-century conflict, these concepts are part of an intellectual trajectory that stretches from the high renaissance of European imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the Cold War to today. On the British frontier of India, in the US-controlled Philippines or in colonial French Indochina and North Africa the task was similar to that faced in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan: to push into unknown territory; to generate influence and understanding there; to defeat rebellion; to fundamentally change that which already existed or to build relationships with local elements who could support one’s own political or strategic objectives. The result was (and is) a series of developments and practices that have, over time, found their expression in the form of contemporary COIN and stabilisation theory and doctrine.

In 2007 General David Petraeus, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, addressed the US Congress on the matter of the highly successful battle then being waged against Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Pointing to events the previous year in Anbar Province and the so-called Awakening there which had signalled the beginning of AQI’s demise, he noted the transformative effects achieved when US forces and local tribes had united in order to destroy their common enemy. While Anbar was unique, he stated, ‘it nevertheless demonstrated the dramatic change in security possible with the support and participation of local citizens’.2 Indeed such was the drastic change in American fortunes over a short period of time that the Anbar Awakening drew huge attention from policymakers and academic and military commentators keen to understand how the methods used might aid a revolution in COIN. The example of Anbar and the subsequent spread of the Awakening movement elsewhere in Iraq appeared to all and sundry to be a twenty-first-century counterinsurgency paradigm. It featured a new and sophisticated doctrine (FM 3-24), a renewed emphasis upon the importance of cultural intelligence, and a highly adaptive response by commanders to local political conditions that had allowed the transformation of a previously moribund politico-military effort into a war-winning design. Such was the apparent success of the model that the campaign in Anbar 2006–8 was hailed by many as the pre-eminent example of US counterinsurgency success in the post-war era.

Whether the United States ever really ‘understood’ the Vietnam War is a question that resonates from the highest echelons of political decision-making down to the lowliest ‘grunt’. Received wisdoms tell us not.2 In popular literature at least, the US campaign in Vietnam is presented as a sort of grisly caricature; an indiscriminate military effort trammelled by an obsession with technology, wedded to the strategy of attrition and fundamentally ignorant of Vietnam as a social and political entity. These failings thus set the ground for a vastly inflated yet curiously half-hearted conventional military and air campaign on the part of the United States that sought to use its traditional strengths of mass, manoeuvre and firepower in order to defeat the North’s politico-military struggle for national liberation.3 Defeat was inevitable.

Why interventions such as Vietnam or Afghanistan fail to achieve their objectives is naturally a consequence of a vast range of factors. Ideology, psychology, strategy, policy, resources and timing matter hugely. As does the enemy’s own agency of course. But in addition to such weighty matters sits the perennial question of whether the external actors in each case truly understood enough of the countries and societies that they were intervening in to give their designs the maximum prospect of success. To that end, this book examines five particular case studies: The British on the North-West Frontier 1919–39, the French campaign in Algeria 1954–62, the US pacification campaign in Vietnam 1966–72, and US-led coalition operations in Iraq 2003–11, and Afghanistan 2001–present. In the context of the themes and issues highlighted so far, these examples are intended to provoke deeper thinking about the way in which forms of knowledge and understanding are brought to bear upon the process of armed intervention.

Over the course of the five case studies in this book, external actors sought to impose change upon a range of indigenous societies in order to satisfy chosen strategic objectives. Through an amalgamation of political measures and military action acting in combination to create a form of political warfare, a range of techniques were deployed to engineer favourable outcomes according to the preferences of that intervening power. Be it in the form of pacification, stabilisation or counterinsurgency, when coming up against populations that were perceived as holding the key to success these actors engaged in a variety of measures to both secure support and crush armed dissent: the offering of economic incentives and opportunity, the implementation of ambitious civic-action initiatives, the empowerment of key local leaders, the attempted reform of local and national governance structures accompanied a range of other actions designed to aid the betterment of local society. Alongside this lay the design and use of population control measures, the dissemination of propaganda, the use of psychological operations, and the attempted mobilisation of alliances and collaborators from among local groups be they class-based, tribal, ethnic or sectarian in nature. Underpinning all of these measures was the ready application of lethal violence when required.

The British experience on the North-West Frontier had revealed some of the inherent tensions that accompanied the ‘political’ approach to pacification. Most obvious of these had been the rival perspectives adopted by civilian officials and administrators on the one hand and their military partners on the other. Lurking beneath had been the question of whether the specialists detailed for the purpose of engineering a relationship between the tribes and government were sufficiently qualified to undertake that task, and whether the process was controllable in the way that they believed. And of course there was the extent to which the government was able to place the broader pacification effort in its proper strategic context and whether it could resist the temptation to allow constant challenges to its authority in the tribal areas to distort its attempts to adopt a measured approach to protecting its interests there. The Algerian War of 1954–62 would see a similar range of challenges (re-)emerge, but in far starker, far more problematic and, in the end, far more extreme ways.

Chapter 5 examines the case of EU nanotechnology policy, showing that the mobilisation of ethics experts acted as atool to check the rise of a potential political conflict on ‘nanos’. By showcasing that a new type of experts representing a diversity of voices had been consulted, EU policymakers ensured that policy remained formulated within a closed community ofactors. They also successfully framed other environmental and health safety concerns as technical, rather than ethical, issues, thus allowing for a compartmentalisation of ethics and a technicalisation of the debate. The mobilisation of ethics experts helped check the rise of conflict because expert knowledge was produced in an iterative process between experts and policymakers. Policymakers gave substantial information to the EGE experts, and informed them about the tenets of the policy debate as well as its policy preferences. But orchestration was facilitated by an embedding of experts into ongoing policy debates and narratives. EU policymakers and ethics experts worked together in various crossing points, such as conferences, workshops and roundtables, where a common way of looking at the issue was developed.