The Nature of War........

The modern worlds’ understanding of the phenomena of war and the role of war in a society has dramatically changed since the tragic days of September 11, 2001. The concept of war is as old as the society itself and the narrative of the human history is an epic tale of the organizational successes and failures to prepare for war on the level of society and the state. The basic principle of the human society, throughout history, has been to prepare itself for organized violence from the efforts of early humans to form hunting parties to villagers protecting themselves from other marauding villagers to the nation-states pursuing their political interests through the instrument of armed conflict. This has not been an easy task and those nation-states and societies which successfully confronted this challenge ensured their own longevity and those that did not, simply became footnotes in the various chapters of history.    

The wars of society and the state existed in many forms and methodologies, but it was the codification of the idea of state power in the middle of the seventeenth century, in Europe, that formalized the role of war, defined as organized armed violence in the employment of the state’s sovereign interests, as the final arbiter of the state’s, and its society’s, legitimacy. The modern nation-state is organized around the idea of waging war and its sense of sovereign independence in international relations is directly proportional to its war making powers. The wars of the seventeenth century were merely the extensions of the monarchial arguments of kings and were fought to settle political disputes and were not the wars of annihilation that they would become later in the twentieth century. Wars of the period from 1648 onwards, at least till the time of the French Revolution in 1789, were relatively civilized affairs and their lethality of destruction was limited due to the reason of limited battlefield technology and the costs associated with waging them.

 

The experience of wars, from 1648 to 1789, was of limited engagements with limited mobility of deployments and the political rationale behind wars was that though wars had to be fought; they had to be limited. There was a very simple explanation behind this idea. It cost vast sums of monies to maintain, train, equip, feed, clothe and pay for a standing army and all of these costs translated into increased taxes, which was never popular with the people who saw every war of the state as another argument for increased taxation. Therefore, the monarchs of the time were forced by the constraints of their societal opinions to limit the wars and the idea of waging wars was not to seek the destruction of the enemies’ forces but to seek and preserve one’s one own forces  from destruction. The militaries of the monarchies of Europe were prized assets and they could not be ruined through war or destroyed because the costs of recreating them would be too prohibitive and the increased taxation, to this purpose, invariably suggested popular agitation against the monarchy itself.

 

Hence, the monarchs of Europe could not afford wars without an end without risking internal instability within their own societies and therefore, they generally saw wars as the very last resort when all the arguments of diplomacy had failed. It was for this reason, and to amplify this rationale, that the French king Louis XIV had, by an imperial order, a Latin inscription stamped onto the barrels of all the French artillery guns, which said “the final argument of kings”. What changed the nature of warfare and introduced the world to the ideas of modern warfare and the role of societies in a modern war, was the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution changed this equation and converted war, as an idea from an argument between monarchs as it was understood, to that of raison d’ etat: the reason of the state. It was the French Revolution that gave the world its’ first wars of nationalism in support of the state’s policies and in doing so, it created the idea of mobilizing the society in favor of a war and made role and contributions of the society to the waging of a war as an organic aspect of the state’s wars.

The wars of the French Revolution differed from wars of the pre-1789 Europe in a very significant manner. The mobilization of the French society in the defense of the ideals of the French Revolution, in the guise of conscription of all males to the war effort, meant that suddenly the French armies had unlimited reservoirs of manpower and recruits to fill their ranks and could fight wars of annihilation, which the rest of the European monarchies could not do. Secondly, by mobilizing their society to the war effort, the French effectively used nationalism and patriotism of the French Revolution as ideas to subsidize the costs of their wars. Consequently, the idea was germinated in the minds of the French that they had to fight till the very bitter end in order to protect their revolution and there could be no compromise that undermined the reasons for which the revolution was instigated; the very reasons they were defending.

This was a revolutionary concept in the idea of warfare as a means of organized violence for political ends, because the wars of the French Revolution greatly differed from the wars which preceded it. It was the French Revolution, which gave inkling into the idea associated with a revolutionary war and as the experience of the French Revolution showed, a revolutionary war is not a war between states, but a war fought internally within a nation to capture political power. This salient observation needs to be appreciated and understood. Even though the revolutionary armies of France were fighting the coalitions of the European monarchies arrayed against them who were determined to reverse the course of the revolution, the idea behind the fighting was still to preserve the political integrity of the revolution and its attendant political power from both domestic (supporters of the French monarchy) and foreign enemies.

It must be pointed out, at this stage, that a revolutionary war should not be confused with a guerrilla war because the two are very different in their aims and intentions. As mentioned before, a revolutionary war is fought to attain and capture political power within a country or a nation-state and therefore, its overarching aim, or rationale, is purely political, and it uses armed violence to attain a political objective. A guerilla war, on the other hand, is an expression of asymmetrical warfare and it is more reflective of a military strategy against overwhelming odds, by favoring hit and run tactics and avoiding pitched battles with superior forces, and is fought in pursuit of a political aim; of resisting political demands but not necessarily with the idea of capturing political power itself.

Between 1789 and 1945, the wars of the French Revolution morphed into the wars of European nationalism and this transition, in the idea of the warfare, reached its high watermark in the shape of the two world wars of the last century. As the idea of warfare resumed a more traditional mantle of conflict, between states, the idea of a revolutionary war and its lessons were forgotten. In the aftermath of the Second World War, in 1945, the world experienced a resurgence of revolutionary wars (wars of liberation and wars that resulted due to the European decolonization in Africa and Asia) but these wars and their political nature was misunderstood since these wars were occurring under the umbrella of a cold war ideological struggle, between the United States and the Soviet Union.

 

For example, the genesis of the Vietnam War was a revolutionary war to gain political power within Vietnam, by the Vietnamese, first from the French and then from the regimes supported by France and the United States. Therefore, the Vietnam War has to be understood in two different contexts. The revolutionary nature of the Vietnam War was to capture political power within Vietnam and the nature of the guerilla warfare, in the Vietnam War, was to fight an asymmetrical political conflict in order to defeat the French and American political-military support to the Vietnamese regimes which were in power and to take political power away from them by denying them the political and military leverage of French and American support.

The political idea and the aim behind the execution of a guerilla war, as in the case of the Vietnam War, is never to defeat a numerically superior force, but to force upon him such political and military costs associated with waging a counter-insurgency campaign that drains the popular political will and lessens the public support for such a war. The overriding and the principle aim of a successful guerilla war campaign is to defeat the military power of an opponent by undermining his political will to wage the war in the first place and this is done by deliberately seeking to prolong the war to such a point, when the civil opinion in the adversary’s own country turns against the war and creates domestic political resistance to war itself.

It was the blinding political rationalisms of the cold war and their devotions to the political dogmas of an ideological confrontation made more rigid by the paranoia of theoretical constructs, such as the Domino Theory and the Iron Curtain, that the nature of revolutionary wars, fought during the cold war, was simply subordinated to the exigencies of the cold war itself and thus, was completely misunderstood. September 11, 2001 helped to end this confusion, but created another misunderstanding. The wars that followed in the wake of September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States were identified as the wars against terrorism and the whole, collective, military effort to defeat terrorism and those political and military groups identified with it, was called the war against terrorism.

The war on terror is just another nomenclature of the idea behind a revolutionary war; the attainment of a political power within a country or a nation-state. The word “terrorism” was actually coined in the aftermath of the suicide attack on the United States’ Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983. It is pertinent to remember that when the United States deployed its troops into Lebanon as peacekeepers, there was a civil war raging within Lebanon itself and the United States was not seen as a neutral participant. Therefore, the heavily armed truck that struck the United States’ Marine Corps headquarters in a suicide attack was a form of asymmetrical retaliation to the United States’ navy targeting one of the groups fighting in the civil war. Since the attack happened during the height of the Cold War, but did not involve a United States-Soviet Union confrontation, the attack was labeled as “terrorism” as it did not fit into any of the preconceived explanations of the idea of an armed conflict within the understood paradigms of the cold war. 

   

The war against terrorism is, therefore, just another revolutionary war by another name. A critical critique of the war on terrorism and the manner in which it is being waged would strongly suggest that that what the United States is actually fighting is not terrorism or any ideas linked with it but is fighting, as a participant on one side of the issue, in an internal armed struggle to decide the balance of a political power within a country. What is commonly misidentified as a war on terror in Iraq, for example, is nothing less than a traditional revolutionary war being fought between the Sunnis and Shias to decide who controls political power in Iraq and has nothing to do with religion per se. The conflict in Iraq is a secular power struggle for political power and the only religious elements to it are the religious identities of the two main protagonists, but their aims are purely secular: political power. 

In a similar sense, the war inside Afghanistan also identified as a war on terror by the United States, is another form of a revolutionary war that is being fought for the sake of political power within Afghanistan. The war inside Afghanistan has a religious color because the Taliban are linked with the idea of a radical Islam, but what the war is really about is an ethnic class-based struggle to demand a share in the distribution of the political power in Afghanistan and this idea is being resisted by the Pushtuns, who have traditionally held power inside Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s misfortune is that its wars have been misunderstood by the outside world but in reality the Taliban may be radical Islamic seminary students, but the misidentification of this revolutionary war within Afghanistan, by the United States, has only alienated the local population and this alienation has found a popular expression of support for the Taliban, not because they are fighting against the United States, but because they are fighting for the cause of the political rights of the Afghan Pushtuns.

If the United States, and its allies, actually hope to win the war on terror, then they will have to remove their political-historic blinkers and make a genuine attempt to understand the political reasons behind the armed resistance being offered to them. The United States and its allies cannot construct an effective strategy to defeat “terror” unless they understand the political motives behind the revolutionary wars inside Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and those motives have more to with a demand in the equal share of political power than they have anything to do with religion. What makes the whole situation into a nightmare of absurd proportions is that the United States, as the case in Vietnam, has simply misunderstood the nature of the war and is fighting a wrong war with the wrong tools; both politically and militarily speaking.

The war on terror, as the revolutionary wars inside Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan are called, will finally end in terms of a political settlement reached over the distribution of political power and not as a result of some battlefield victory. These wars are not about the “hearts and minds” of the people involved in it, but they are about a dilemma on how to fashion a political balance of power, within those nations, which satisfies the political demands of those groups that are resisting the United States and its allies in a military sense by waging a campaign of guerilla war against them.

This is a war, pragmatically speaking, that the United States would find very hard to win if not impossible to win. The final outcome of this revolutionary war, mispronounced as the war on terrorism, does not reside in the ability of the United States’ political and military power forcing these groups to negotiating table, but whether its allies inside Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are willing to sit at the same proverbial negotiating table with them and agree to share political power with them. Just like any other revolutionary war, these wars will be won and lost not by the United States, but by its allies, with whom it is allied, and how they approach the political problems of this war and how effective they are in resolving the issues amongst themselves.

Therefore, it is for this reason that the nature of wars and their politics have to be clearly understood and it is only once the political nature of a war is truly understood that a right political policy can be crafted, which then influences the military strategy designed to attain the political aims of a particular war. What the last ten years of the war on terrorism have shown is that the United States and its allies have totally failed to understand the real nature of this conflict and in doing so, have approached it with wrong policies with predictably disastrous results.

War and the politics of war is too serious a phenomena not be understood and those, who play with the fires of war and politics without respecting its power, usually find themselves consumed by very fires they have ignited themselves and it is for this reason that the phenomena of war must be studied and understood by those who practice it in the words of Louis XIV, “the final argument of kings”.