Strategic Narrative

[KingJaja]

Bill,

I agree that folks like Saddam and Gaddafi were corrupt, but at least they could keep the peace. When the US comes into situations like this, it usually empowers a set of corrupt but weak leaders - leaders who are just as corrupt but are unable to maintain security.

Was Saddam less competent than Malaki? Was Gaddafi less competent than whoever is running Libya?

Most people tend to worry more about feeding their kids, getting them ahead in life and ensuring that justice is served. Lofty ideals like democracy never meant much to my grandmother.

It is these kinds of gaps that Al Qaeda or their imitators love to exploit.

As you know, I come from Nigeria. Actually Nigeria has two insurgencies raging on - Niger Delta and Boko Haram. Both are partly attributable to poor governance.

What you might not know (as Western news media tends to focus on one story at a time) is that there is an epidemic of kidnappings in the South East (outside the Niger Delta). There is also an organisation MASSOB - Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (does that sound familiar?) that is growing in prominence in that part of Nigeria.

For example, MASSOB was/is heavily involved in transporting and resettling South-Easterners who were displaced by the Boko Haram crisis. They are doing the social welfare bit now, they'll get to other bits in future.

Bill, I have lived in Nigeria/Africa long enough to know that poor governance leads to insurgencies over time. As recently as 1993, I went to Port Harcourt (the heart of the Niger Delta) with my dad. It was a peaceful town, but the behaviour of the police and the glaring differences between the living standards of Oil and Gas company employees and the locals pointed to trouble in future - and it came.

Someone said that COIN in Afghanistan is all about out-governing the Taliban. That should seem easy enough, but when Mullah Omar controlled large swathes of Afghanistan, his word was law. There was a judicial process that led to predictable results, crime was at a minimum and Afghanistan was a much safer place.

The same applies to Al Shabab and the Islamic courts system. For the brief period they held sway, they managed to create order out of chaos.

It is these popular memories - i.e. our local/ethnic/religious militia/organisation can provide social services, avenge wrong doing by heavy-handed security services (and the US military) and give us a sense of self-worth after decades of real or percieved marginalisation/intimidation that make these organisations so difficult to fight.

If you square this up with America's reputation for creating even more chaos out of chaos when the US Military is involved, immediately you realise there is a very SERIOUS problem.

[Tukhachevskii]

The Language of Jihad: Narratives and Strategies of Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula

[Bob's World]

There is nothing "simplistic" about the nature of the relationship between any government and all of the many diverse and distinct popualces such organizaitons seek to govern. But it is a simple fact that insurgency is about discontent within such relationships between those who govern, and those who are governed. If it is about criminal profits or some other non-political goal, then it is not insurgency, no matter how much it might grow to threaten government.

I am not sure why that concept scares the holy hell out of so many. Perhaps because it drops the primary onus for the existance of insurgency, for the causation of insurgency, squarely in the lap governments everywhere. So much more convenient to blame external factors beyond one's control, like "malign actors" or "ideology" or some other "not my fault" bogey man. Or to blame local powerbrokers

Certainly when conditions of insurgency exist between some populace group and their government, all of these things emerge. Leaders will certainly emerge who are willing to break the law to seek change. Some will be truly selfless and for positive change, most will be selfish exploiters who see and opportunity to advance their own personal cause or agenda. Smart leaders will craft a narrative that speaks to their target populace, and they will craft it in terms that the state is unlikely to feel it can adopt or co-opt; with the result being the state resorting to the poor strategies of "competing" less effective messages that reinforce an approach to governance already deemed unacceptable by their target audiance.

"Poor Governance" is a very broad family of complex human emotions. At the end of the day, it is not the type of government, the state of the economy or any of a thousand other possible drivers that move a populace to insurgency. It is how that populace feels about those things and who they blame. When they feel strongly and blame government, one has the conditions for insurgency. Once one has those conditions it only takes some spark to set things in motion. It may build slowly or explode all at once, it might be very violent and look a lot like warfare, or it may be very non-violent and look like civil unrest. The key is to appreciate and treat the causation and not simply throw blame at various sticky problems and attack the symptoms. Sadly that is the approach most governments take. That is why most governments suck at COIN, because good governments generally don't have to deal with insurgency to begin with.

[KingJaja]

Bob's World,

Poor governance is much easier than good governance - and that is why poorly governed spaces abound.

Good governance means institutions, taxes, law enforcement etc. All of these institutions are very difficult to build and maintain, so elites tend to choose the easy way out.

A trade off is usually made between the costs of good governance and the benefit of leaving things the way are. In many cases the costs outweigh the benefits (I am speaking from the POV of a Karzai or a Kabila).

How do we make good governance less costly for the likes of Karzai and Kabila?

[Bob's World]

We don't solve this. This is a question for the people of Afghanistan to work out with their own government. When effective legal means are available to work these things out we call it "politics"; when such means are not available we call it a wide range of things depending on who one asks, but I call it "insurgency."

What is adequate varies widely by country, by culture and over time. Those societies which develop trusted and certain systems to legally make necessary adjustments create the flexibility and populace control necesary for stability. Those systems that become overly rigid and inflexible hold strong until they break, and when they break they break hard. Most societies that have flexible systems now had to act out illegally and typically violently, to break some pre-existing inflexible system. Too often one has to tear down the old to build new, and too often what is built looks far too much like what was there previously, only to have to tear it all down yet again.

This is all very natural. It has undoubtedly happened since man first organized into social groups. It will continue to happen.

But the better we understand it, the better we can mitigate the negative aspects and effects. But step one is getting governments to step up and take responsibility, and that is more often than not the hardest step of all.

[Dayuhan]

How do we make good governance less costly for the likes of Karzai and Kabila?

Who exactly is "we" in this picture? May I be excused?

I don't think there is any "we" that can "fix" these situations... and in all honesty, even with the best will possible, I doubt that a Karzai or a Kabila could. Institutions and systems aren't built or installed, and the societies in question have to grow with them. Sometimes that means they have to break into less incompatible parts.

We don't solve this. This is a question for the people of Afghanistan to work out with their own government. When effective legal means are available to work these things out we call it "politics"; when such means are not available we call it a wide range of things depending on who one asks, but I call it "insurgency."

What is adequate varies widely by country, by culture and over time. Those societies which develop trusted and certain systems to legally make necessary adjustments create the flexibility and populace control necesary for stability. Those systems that become overly rigid and inflexible hold strong until they break, and when they break they break hard. Most societies that have flexible systems now had to act out illegally and typically violently, to break some pre-existing inflexible system. Too often one has to tear down the old to build new, and too often what is built looks far too much like what was there previously, only to have to tear it all down yet again.

This is all very natural. It has undoubtedly happened since man first organized into social groups. It will continue to happen.

But the better we understand it, the better we can mitigate the negative aspects and effects. But step one is getting governments to step up and take responsibility, and that is more often than not the hardest step of all.

In the language of the thread, I suspect that you may be imposing your personal narrative on situations where it doesn't necessarily apply. No narrative is universal.

Insurgency is not necessarily about "a populace" and "a government". It can be about two or more subsets of a populace fighting for power. When one of those subsets happens to be the government we call it "insurgency", but the root conflict is populace vs populace, not populace vs government. Put the Taliban back in power and you still have insurgency, just with different parties wearing different hats. Of course we can imagine a unified government representing all the populaces involved, but we can imagine lots of stuff. Imagining it won't make it happen.

Imagining "a society" with an inflexible "system" that needs to become flexible overlooks the reality that in many conflict areas there are multiple societies with irreconcilable expectations, lumped together in arbitrarily designated "nations" based on little more than the whims of colonial cartography. I don't know how realistic it is to expect systems to grow that will accommodate those parts, and it's definitely unrealistic to think any outside power can make that happen.

The idea of "getting governments to step up and take responsibility" seems to assume that the government is something separate from the societies and populaces it governs, and does not necessarily reflect their divisions. Again, not realistic. We are not going to persuade any government, anywhere, to do what we want it to do if it sees that action as opposed to its own interests. They may fake it in exchange for concessions (we make that easy), but not much more.

[KingJaja]

Who exactly is "we" in this picture? May I be excused?

I don't think there is any "we" that can "fix" these situations... and in all honesty, even with the best will possible, I doubt that a Karzai or a Kabila could. Institutions and systems aren't built or installed, and the societies in question have to grow with them. Sometimes that means they have to break into less incompatible parts.

By we I meant the global community.

[jmm99]

I like Western-Islamic World View Conflicts as a starting point (HT to T). The applicable project, The Struggle of Narratives-Attempting to Visualize It (11 pdfs):

Project Description

Background

However else we characterize the current world situation, we must acknowledge that we are involved in a struggle of worldviews (or as some have called it, a "struggle of narratives"). It may not be a Huntington's "clash of civilizations" but it is most certainly a struggle of ideas. Among the topics we considered in this project are:

What do we mean by struggle of narratives as a context within which diplomacy, politics and the use of force takes place?

How is this more than simply the old battle for the "hearts and minds" of the populace?

Can the pitched battle of the media be thought of as the "New Fog of War" quite different from that described by Clausewitz?

How might a picture of this struggle look from the point of view of our visualization of public policy?

Are there new ways to portray the ideological conflict that might help us understand this process more deeply?

...
Wicked problems

Our view is complex public policy issues constitute what Horst Rittel has called "wicked problems." We sometimes call them ill-structured problems and more informally "social messes."

Wicked problems are situations that have these properties:

complicated, complex, and ambiguous

uncertainty even as to what the problems are, let alone what the solutions might be

great constraints

tightly interconnected, economically, socially, politically, technologically

seen differently from different points of view, and quite different worldviews

contain many value conflicts

are often a-logical or illogical

... (much more)

JMM Comments on the Western-Islamic World View Conflicts chart.

I'd suggest that someone more qualified than myself check out the bullet points for the Traditional Islamic View and for the Militant Islamic Beliefs (the latter appear to be based on Maududi). Whoever does that should be a firm Muslim Traditionalist. I'd also suggest that the Islamic World is not so simple; e.g., the basic division between Sunni and Shia.

Western Constitutional / Democratic / Capitalistic Ideology is scarcely a monolith with huge differences in Worldview between various blocks. I'm drawing out in my head at least a half-dozen blocks - and they are not all "Western". So, the Western Constitutional / Democratic / Capitalistic Ideology as stated is an idealized set of bullet points.

Taking the "Western Constitutional / Democratic / Capitalistic Ideology" as a given, solely for purposes of discussion, one should add a "Western" Left Hook (POW !, as the cartoons say) entitled "Western Attack". That to match the Islamic Left Hook entitled "Militant Counterattack" (POW !). Of course, that immediately leads to an argument as to who attacked first - ah, yes, competing narratives.

The parent webpage, R. Horn Home, leads to his Bio:

Robert E. Horn is a political scientist with a special interest in policy communication, social learning, and knowledge management (especially in biotechnology and national security affairs). For the past 7 years, he has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information. His career has been widely interdisciplinary, leading a team (in the 1960s) that developed an information system covering 400 federal programs on education and training, editing a standard reference work that evaluated over 1,500 educational simulations in 35 academic disciplines (in the 1970s), and creating, while he was a research associate at Columbia University, a widely used methodology for the analysis of any complex subject matter. He turned this research into an international consulting company, specializing in knowledge management, called Information Mapping, Inc., (in the 1980s) which he founded and was CEO of for 15 years. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia, and Sheffield (U.K.) universities

His recent development of visual argumentation mapping has resulted in the publication of the Mapping Great Debates series, which, in the past year and a half, has received a full-page review in Nature, as well as being hung in a national museum in The Hague as part of an exhibit on information design as a fine art.

Horn is also Vice President of the Meridian International Institute on Governance, Leadership Learning and the Future, which is a policy think tank. For the past several years, he has been leading a project exploring the possibilities for using highly visual cognitive maps to aid the policy making process (especially science and security matters). His most recently published book is Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century (www.macrovu.com). At Stanford he continues his research work in knowledge management and information design. His consulting clients have included Boeing, Lucent Technologies, Principal Financial, AT&T, HP, and other Global 1000 companies.

This year he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for the work on the Information Mapping method from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and a member of its nominations committee. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a recipient of the Outstanding Research Award from the National Society for Performance and Instruction (NSPI).

Lots of "stuff" - too much "stuff" ? (you judge).

Regards

Mike