Da coluna de "Leisure and Arts" do The Wall Street Journal (certamente o melhor jornal capitalista da atualidade, com o seu confrade britânico Financial Times), desta quarta-feira, 19 de julho de 2006:
BOOKSHELF
The Tribal Way of War
Forget Clausewitz: Nations now fight clans driven by pride, vengeance and martial religiosity.
BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN
The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, July 19, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
While the U.S. spends billions of dollars on sophisticated defense systems, the dime-a-dozen kidnapper and suicide bomber have emerged as the most strategic weapons of war. While we tie ourselves in legal knots over war's acceptable parameters, international law has increasingly less bearing on those whom we fight. And while our commanders declare "force protection" as their highest priority, enemy commanders declare the need for more martyrs. It seems that the more advanced we become, the more at a disadvantage we are in the 21st-century battlefield.
In "Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias," Richard H. Shultz Jr. and Andrea J. Dew, both of Tufts's Fletcher School, have produced a wise and cogent briefing book about who our enemies are and how to anticipate their field tactics. The problem, they state early on, is that the Pentagon--the product of a rational, science-based Western culture--relies on objective quantification for its analysis. But what happens, the authors ask, if there is nothing to quantify? What happens if the enemy is merely an organic part of the landscape, revealing its features only at the moment of attack? Well, then all we can do is study these "idiosyncratic" human landscapes and use anthropology to improve our intelligence assessments.
Forget Karl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is a last resort and circumscribed by the methodical actions and requirements of a state and its army. Forget Hugo Grotius's notion that war should be circumscribed by a law of nations. As the authors remind us, paraphrasing the anthropologist Harry Turney-High: "Tribal and clan chieftains did not employ war as a cold-blooded and calculated policy instrument. . . . Rather, it was fought for a host of social-psychological purposes and desires, which included . . . honor, glory, revenge, vengeance, and vendetta." With such motives, torture and beheadings become part of the normal ritual of war.
Because Mr. Shultz and Ms. Dew take tribes seriously, they don't stereotype them. The whole point of this book is that, because each tribal culture is unique, each will fight in its own way; it is a matter of knowing what a culture is truly capable of once it feels itself threatened. Thus the heart of the book is case studies.
The Somali way of war--so startling to U.S. Army Rangers in Mogadishu in 1993--emerged from Somalia's late-19th-century Dervish movement, on which the country's top warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, based his strategy. What the West viewed as fanaticism was merely the Somali proclivity for judging a man's character by his religious conviction and his physical ability to fight without limits. In the Somali worldview, our aversion to killing women and children was a weakness that could be exploited by using noncombatants as human shields. Clearly, the task of anticipating the enemy's tactics requires thinking that goes beyond Western moral categories.
There is no better example of how traditional warrior cultures hold fast in the face of globalization than Chechnya, where cowardice is among the worst of transgressions and a dagger the most prized material item. There is in Chechnya, too, as the authors note, the Sufi proclivity for asceticism and mysticism: the former providing the mental discipline for overcoming physical hardships and the latter for sustaining morale. Furthermore, the Chechens' decentralized, clan-based structure--and their tradition of raiding--help to determine their guerrilla style, which has resulted in lethal hit-and-run tactics by small units on large, conventional Russian forces in the "urban canyons" of Grozny.
It's all in the local history. As one Afghan elder said in the early 1800s: "We are content with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood," but "we will never be content with a master." And so, in the late 1900s, an Afghan mujahedeen commander explained why the Soviet Union lost a war: His men intended to fight to the last man, while the Russians didn't.
As for Iraq, the authors write: "Things could have turned out differently. . . . The traditional Iraqi way of war, and how Iraq fits into the larger global jihad, could have been deduced by U.S. planners" for the sake of a better military outcome. Saddam expanded his military machine by tribalizing it. Rather than eliminate Sunni clan networks, he incorporated them into his bureaucratic system of control. Thus if his army ever disintegrated, the result would be a congeries of Bedouin-like raiding parties, each with a tight social network, reprimitivized for the urban jungle.
Our progressive global culture--with its emphasis on convenience and instant gratification--finds it difficult to cope with such warriors, for whom war is a first resort rather than a last one. And what if a warrior takes command of a large and modernizing nation-state, as Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has done? We are accustomed to adversarial states with rational goals, like China. In the long run, China may constitute a greater threat to American world leadership than Iran. Yet China is a traditional and, therefore, legitimate power. We will have a serious military competition with the Chinese, but only through miscalculation would we ever fight them. Yet the darkest cloud on the 21st-century horizon is big states whose leaders may simply like to fight. Their reasons are tied up with pride, vengeance and martial religiosity and cannot be gratified through negotiations.
What then should we do? The authors quote Sun Tzu, the fourth-century B.C. Chinese theorist of war: "Know your enemy." This book is a good place to start.
Mr. Kaplan is a national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly and the author of "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground." You can buy "Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
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