Feral Jundi

“It is clear that war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means.” Karl Von Clauswitz

“What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.” – Sun Tzu

     First off, I want to mention that this post is the product of one of my reader’s ‘a ha’ moments.  What really makes this cool is that this reader is a fan of the ‘building snowmobiles’ posts on FJ and this was him putting together these random pieces and creating something out of all of it.  He had attended a college course years back that covered economic theory, he is well read on the war and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he had read Feral Jundi and knew how fun analysis and synthesis can be, and then finally stumbled on some recent news about the war and Taliban strategy, and put it all together. And this is me trying to assemble the thing based on his instructions, and I am thoroughly enjoying myself.

     Simply put, this is about using economic theory as a potential tool to predict enemy strategies, so you can defeat those strategies.  Because like Sun Tzu says, it ‘is of supreme importance to attack the enemy’s strategy’. Of course I am not going to go all out and say you can predict with 100 percent certainty what your enemy will do. Still, the closer you can get the better, and these are potential tools you can use for predictive analysis.

    In this exercise, we will use Afghanistan and the current war against the Taliban there. At this time, we are also using a counter-insurgency strategy.  The Taliban are considered the insurgents in this case, and they too are using a insurgency type strategy.  Both strategies are heavily influenced by gaining the support of the population. Famous counter-insurgent David Galula had this to say about counterinsurgency:

The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population Galula proposes four “laws” for counterinsurgency:

1.The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory.

2.Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority.

3.Support of the population may be lost. The population must be efficiently protected to allow it to cooperate without fear of retribution by the opposite party.

4.Order enforcement should be done progressively by removing or driving away armed opponents, then gaining support of the population, and eventually strengthening positions by building infrastructure and setting long-term relationships with the population. This must be done area by area, using a pacified territory as a basis of operation to conquer a neighbouring area.

Galula contends that:

A victory [in a counterinsurgency] is not the destruction in a given area of the insurgent’s forces and his political organization. … A victory is that plus the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, isolation not enforced upon the population, but maintained by and with the population. … In conventional warfare, strength is assessed according to military or other tangible criteria, such as the number of divisions, the position they hold, the industrial resources, etc. In revolutionary warfare, strength must be assessed by the extent of support from the population as measured in terms of political organization at the grass roots. The counterinsurgent reaches a position of strength when his power is embedded in a political organization issuing from, and firmly supported by, the population. 

   I wanted to put this out there first as one of the main definitions of COIN, so we have somewhere to start.(most strategies are population-centric)  In this war, we are basically fighting for the support of the people, and you could easily say that this is politics with guns.  You could also say that both sides of this conflict are selling to the population that they are a better idea and friend than the other guy.  The Taliban use their methods to achieve population support, and we use ours. In other words, we are in the business of politics in this war. We are trying to win votes or popularity, and like politicians, we are finding all and any way to win as many votes as possible.

    Another way to look at it is that each side of the war is trying to sell an idea to these populations.  It is our ideas versus the Taliban’s ideas, and for the sake of this post, the Afghan population is the consumer. And both the Taliban and the Coalition are competing for market share.

   This is the goal of this post.  To classify the population as a market/voters/consumers, and to try to apply economic theory to the whole thing.  If you are with me so far, thanks for hanging on.  Because this next bit is where we start assembling the pieces of this machine.

   Now we can start introducing economic theory to this conversation, if we are to assume the Afghans are the ‘consumers’ or ‘voters’. The theory that inspired my reader is The Hoteling-Downs Model of Spatial/Political Competition. Here is a basic run down of what it is all about:

Harold Hoteling analyzed a model of spatial competition; i.e. the location of different sellers in a market respect to one another. Anthony Downs saw that this model could explain some aspects of political competition of candidates with respect to ideological position.

Hoteling investigated how sellers would choose locations along a a linear market, say ice cream stands along a beach. He assumed that the product was uniform so customers would buy from the nearest seller. Suppose as is shown in the diagram below that there are only two sellers and they are located at the quarter points of the beach. The two sellers would then each capture one half of the beach ice cream market.

If the customers were evenly distributed along the beach then the arrangement shown would have the advantage that it would reduce the amount of walking by the customers to a minimum. But that arrangement is not stable. Seller M would have a profit incentive to move toward Seller N, in fact to move just to the west of Seller N and thereby capture three quarters of the ice cream market. Likewise Seller N would have an incentive to move toward Seller M. They might jocky around for a locational advantage but the only place they could settle down is at the midpoint of the beach. Again each gets one half of the market, but now the average distance customers have to walk is double what it was when the sellers were located at the quarter points.

If the customers were not evenly distributed along the beach the tendency of the ice cream sellers under competition would be to locate at the median point, the point where half of the customers are to the west of that point and half are to the east of it.

Hoteling also considered what the effect of having more than two sellers would be on the location of the sellers.

Anthony Downs noted that Hoteling’s model could explain political competition. Instead of a beach the linear market is the political spectrum. The assumption is that each voter will vote for the candidate or party that is closest to his or her political position. Thus when a candidate takes a position to the right of the other candidate he or she will get the votes of all to the right of that position. As with the ice cream sellers on the beach the political candidates will choose a political position that is virtually the same as their opponent’s. Furthermore the candidates will be driven to select the political position of the median voter.

     So if Hoteling is right, can we not predict that not only will we seek the center in order to sell our ideas and gain support of the population, but the enemy will eventually find themselves being drawn to the center in order to seek more population market share? And if we were to take the political angle to the next level to further simplify this concept, just imagine the Taliban as the Democrats and the Coaltion as the Republicans(or whatever political groups fit your country)

   In the case of the Taliban Democrats, they might have left leanings and a strong left base.  They might really want the Taliban Democrat candidate to really come down hard with Sharia Law on the population, and chop some heads off in order to impose their will. In other words, the candidate wants to win a lot of votes, but maintaing a far left position will only win him the minimal votes of those specific voters.  To move to the moderate middle, will gain more votes, and will put more of the other side’s left leaning voters, on the Taliban Democrat side.

     The Coalition Republicans might have some extreme right leanings and a strong and opinionated right base.  They too have some very specific ideas on how Afghanistan should be, all based on western ideas of governance or what the ‘west’ considers civilized.  They could also be extremely against the burqa and all the other things that might be repulsive to the rest of the world, but in Afghanistan is the norm. Yet again, the Coalition Republicans will have to move more to the middle of the political spectrum in order to attract more voters to their candidate.  If the idea is to win the popular support, then you need to bring more folks into your tent.  It is kind of hard to do that, if you are hanging out on the far left or far right.  It is best to head to the middle, and capture as many types of voters as possible. ‘The political candidates will choose a political position that is virtually the same as their opponent’s. Furthermore the candidates will be driven to select the political position of the median voter.’ 

    So can we assume that according the rules of this economic theory, that both sides will react accordingly in an insurgency?  Are we, or will we see both sides of the conflict gravitate to the middle in order to gain the most amount of supporters?

     To answer those questions, I have tried to find any proof out there that would support this. Which brings me to the ‘a ha’ moment my reader had.  When the Taliban came out with a Code of Conduct, this was to him just one example of one side of the conflict trying to win more market share of the population. Actually, when the Taliban published their Code of Conduct, it came out around the same time that General Petraeus came out with his new updated COIN rules (or a Code of Conduct for the troops). Both documents are symbols of both sides efforts to appeal to the public and get their forces to the middle.

    In the case of the Taliban, their so called ‘Code’ is in stark contrast to what they have actually done.  But still, it is a method of trying to gain more supporters.  And if the Code is actually followed, the Taliban might actually kill less civilians.  With that said, if they can minimize civilian casualties, they will win more market share or population support. Now can they achieve this, and still continue their attacks against the coalition?  Who knows, but this new approach to protecting the population by trying to minimize civilian casualties, is a way to run to the middle.  It is not extreme, and it certainly appeals to the population more so than when the Taliban do kill innocents.

    Of course the Coalition’s strategy needs no explanation.  We have been trying to protect the population for a while now.  Our goal is certainly to run to the center and get as many votes and popular support as possible.  From our aid programs, to restrictive ROE’s, to the billions spent on troops and setting up all of these programs.  We are definitely in the business of politics, and trying to win support. And we definitely know that killing civilians doesn’t win any friends.  In fact, it only drives more voters to the Taliban.

    The other angle on this is that usually two sides of a war tend to either copy one another, or copy another model of warfare that was successful in another similar war.  I have talked about this strategy before, where you copy the strategy and tactics of the best guy out there, and add one little thing to give you an edge.  That one little thing could be the use of firearms, or even UAV’s. It could also mean getting lighter and more mobile.  There are lots of examples of this throughout the history of warfare.

     In the world of business, you see the same thing.  A car company that is immensely successful, is usually studied and copied by it’s competitors.  And in order to get the edge, they add one or two little innovative things to that model to make them that much more successful and competitive.

     This example of mimicry, could also cause the Taliban to move to the center and adapt some of these principles of their enemy in order to grab more supporters. Hell, I am sure they read all the same books, and even study our manuals and ‘codes of conduct’. We are learning things from the Taliban as well, and trying to mimic them in some aspects in order to gain more supporters.  Could this mimicry process make both sides of the conflict seem like the same in the eyes of the population they are fighting over?

    Now for the good stuff.  If a study were to really evaluate warfare and see if it’s patterns fit within the realm of economic theory, then maybe we should start looking more at what economists have to say about where both sides of a conflict are heading?  I have brought up just one example with the help of a reader.  Perhaps there are more snowmobiles to build out there that would further help strategists not only to analyze the enemy’s actions properly, but actually predict where they are going with strategy.

     In the case of the The Hoteling-Downs Model of Spatial/Political Competition, where we are applying it to the strategies of both sides of the war in Afghanistan, we can say that if both sides of the conflict want to sell more of their ideas, get more votes, and gain more population market share, that they would both have to set up shop in the middle.  If we were to fight another counter-insurgency at another time and in another place, could we also say that both sides would gravitate to the middle in order to gain popular support? Stuff to think about and I want to hear what you think. –Matt

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Taliban code of conduct seeks to win hearts, minds

By MATIULLAH ACHAKZAI

August 4, 2010

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan — An updated Taliban code of conduct urges fighters to avoid killing civilians and forbids them from seizing weapons and money, a directive aimed at winning hearts and minds of Afghans also being courted by international forces.

But the document declares that people working for international forces or the Afghan government are “supporters of the infidels” and can be killed. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar took a similar hard line in orders to insurgents that NATO forces said they intercepted in early June.

Mullah Omar urged fighters to kill anyone working with international forces or the Afghan government, including women, according to NATO.

The Taliban began distributing their new code of conduct in southern Afghanistan a little over a week ago, shortly before the top NATO commander in the country, Gen. David Petraeus, issued guidelines that also urged soldiers to avoid civilian casualties.

“The Taliban must treat civilians according to Islamic norms and morality to win over the hearts and minds of the people,” said the 69-page Taliban booklet, which was obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday from a Taliban fighter in the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak.

“All efforts must be made to avoid harming civilians in attacks,” said the booklet, which the insurgent said began circulating in Afghanistan 10 days ago. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted.

International forces have also stressed that protecting the population is key to winning the nearly 9-year-old war and have highlighted U.N. findings that the Taliban are responsible for most civilian deaths through suicide attacks and roadside bombs — a message the insurgent leaders are likely trying to counter with their new directives.

On Monday, a suicide car bomber near Kandahar blew himself up near a vehicle taking an Afghan official to work, killing six children instead, police said.

The new code of conduct, which was published at the end of May, is an update to a similar set of directives released a year earlier that limited the use of suicide bombers and mandated that prisoners cannot be harmed or ransomed without the approval of a Taliban regional commander.

NATO and Afghan officials criticized last year’s code as propaganda and insisted it does not reflect how the Taliban really fight. Analysts familiar with the Taliban said it was more of a political statement than a military textbook, meant to counter the international coalition’s own attempts at winning hearts and minds.

Petraeus reinforced that effort by distributing revised “Counterinsurgency Guidance” to NATO troops in Afghanistan this week, about a month after he took command in the country.

“The people are the center of gravity,” said the document. “Only by providing them security and earning their trust and confidence can the Afghan government and (international forces) prevail.”

Petraeus also advised the troops to “hunt the enemy aggressively” but use the minimum amount of force necessary to avoid civilian casualties. The commander’s predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, placed strict limits on the use of airstrikes and firepower.

“We can’t win without fighting, but we also cannot kill or capture our way to victory,” said the guidance. “Moreover, if we kill civilians or damage their property in the course of our operations, we will create more enemies than our operations eliminate.”

At least 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed in fighting last year — up 14 percent from 2008, according to the United Nations. But the U.N. found that the percentage of civilian deaths attributed to NATO and Afghan government forces had dropped. About two-thirds of the civilian deaths were a result of actions initiated by the insurgents.

NATO commanders hope that keeping pressure on the Taliban will force their leaders eventually to negotiate and will push lower-level fighters to lay down their weapons and accept government reintegration offers.

The Taliban urged their fighters not to surrender in their new code of conduct, saying “such acts enhance the morale of our enemies.”

The insurgents also declared that all fighters must have beards unless given special exemption and are prohibited from smoking cigarettes, which are often viewed as un-Islamic by radical groups like the Taliban.

Story here.

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Study says rules aimed at curbing Afghan civilian casualties also reduce attacks on U.S. troops

Ken Dilania

August 3, 2010

Efforts to reduce civilian casualties by restricting U.S. air strikes and other uses of force in Afghanistan are also sparing American troops from attack, according to a new study to be unveiled today.

Tighter rules of engagement put in place last year by Gen. Stanley McCrystal have provoked complaints among U.S. troops that their lives have been put at risk. McCrystal’s replacement, Gen. David Petraeus, promised lawmakers last month he would reexamine how the rules had been implemented, while expressing overall support for them.

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, being released todayat the non-partisan New America Foundation in Washington, found that civilian casualties in Afghanistan from U.S. and NATO actions “are associated with a substantively and statistically large increase in attacks” by the Taliban and other militants.

The study undercuts the notion that the military faces a zero-sum choice between protecting its troops and protecting civilians, said one of the authors, Jacob Shapiro of Princeton University.

“Doing a little bit more to protect civilians looks like it reduces the rate of attacks,” he said.

The study, funded by the Air Force and Stanford University, analyzed 4,000 civilian casualties and 25,000 fights between U.S.-led forces and insurgents over 15 months ending April 1. A typical incident that caused two Afghan civilian deaths provoked six revenge attacks in the district by the Taliban and other militants, the study found.

“The data are consistent with the claim that civilian casualties are affecting future violence through increased recruitment into insurgent groups after a civilian-casualty incident,” the study says.

Military officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have long acknowledged that civilian casualties were fueling the insurgency in Afghanistan, which is why McCrystal pushed hard to reduce them. Officials have noted that the Pashtun ethic group, which dominates the Afghan insurgency, lives by a code of honor requiring men to avenge the deaths of relatives.

“Our findings buttress arguments that the social traditions of the Pashtun ethnic group, which dominates the Taliban… are a key factor in supporting the insurgency,” the authors write.

The causal effect was different in Iraq, which the study also examined, and found that civilian casualties in a particular district did not result in a similar long-term increase in insurgent violence in that district. The finding also is consistent with what U.S. military officials have observed. In Iraq, the U.S. military has tamped down anger over civilian deaths and injuries by making payments to families. That approach has been greeted with affront in Afghanistan.

“The evidence shows that the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are quite different in how civilian casualties affect the ability of insurgents to produce violence,” the study says. “In Afghanistan, we find strong evidence of a revenge effect. In Iraq, we find no such effect.”

McCrystal’s curbs on U.S. air strikes and mortar attacks have resulted in fewer civilian deaths attributed to American forces so far this year, according to a July report by the Afghan Human Rights Monitor, a watchdog group often critical of U.S. policy. Due to a larger number coalition troops footprint and a more active insurgency, there were more civilian deaths in the first six months of this year than in the same period last year, the group found — 1,074 compared with 1,059. But 60 percent of the deaths were attributed to insurgents.

Analyzing a NATO database, the American researchers found an average of 10.5 civilian deaths and injuries per day _ most of them caused by insurgents. The U.S. and NATO harm a higher proportion of women and children than insurgents do, the researchers found.

At his Senate confirmation hearing last month, Petraeus heard concerns from lawmakers about whether the rules of engagement were preventing troops from properly defending themselves. The general said he would take care to insure that junior commanders were not misinterpreting the rules in an overly restrictive manner.

The rules themselves are “fundamentally sound,” Petraeus said. “I don’t see any reason to change them in significant ways.”

Story here.

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The Hoteling-Downs Model of Spatial/Political Competition

Harold Hoteling analyzed a model of spatial competition; i.e. the location of different sellers in a market respect to one another. Anthony Downs saw that this model could explain some aspects of political competition of candidates with respect to ideological position.

Hoteling investigated how sellers would choose locations along a a linear market, say ice cream stands along a beach. He assumed that the product was uniform so customers would buy from the nearest seller. Suppose as is shown in the diagram below that there are only two sellers and they are located at the quarter points of the beach. The two sellers would then each capture one half of the beach ice cream market.

If the customers were evenly distributed along the beach then the arrangement shown would have the advantage that it would reduce the amount of walking by the customers to a minimum. But that arrangement is not stable. Seller M would have a profit incentive to move toward Seller N, in fact to move just to the west of Seller N and thereby capture three quarters of the ice cream market. Likewise Seller N would have an incentive to move toward Seller M. They might jocky around for a locational advantage but the only place they could settle down is at the midpoint of the beach. Again each gets one half of the market, but now the average distance customers have to walk is double what it was when the sellers were located at the quarter points.

If the customers were not evenly distributed along the beach the tendency of the ice cream sellers under competition would be to locate at the median point, the point where half of the customers are to the west of that point and half are to the east of it.

Hoteling also considered what the effect of having more than two sellers would be on the location of the sellers.

Anthony Downs noted that Hoteling’s model could explain political competition. Instead of a beach the linear market is the political spectrum. The assumption is that each voter will vote for the candidate or party that is closest to his or her political position. Thus when a candidate takes a position to the right of the other candidate he or she will get the votes of all to the right of that position. As with the ice cream sellers on the beach the political candidates will choose a political position that is virtually the same as their opponent’s. Furthermore the candidates will be driven to select the political position of the median voter.

Link here.

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The standard Hotelling model fits two ice cream vendors on a beach. The vendors sell an identical product, and they can choose to locate wherever they wish. For the time being, suppose the price they charge for ice cream is fixed at $1. Potential customers are also spread randomly along the beach.

We let the beach span an interval from 0 to 1. People desiring ice cream will walk to the closest vendor because the price is the same. Thus, if one vendor locates at x and the other at y, and x < y, those located between 0 and ½ (x + y) go to the left vendor, while the rest go to the right vendor.

Figure 17.2. Sharing the Hotelling Market

Note that the vendor at x sells more by moving toward y, and vice versa. Such logic forces profit-maximizing vendors to both locate in the middle. The one on the left sells to everyone left of ½, while the one on the right sells to the rest. Neither can capture more of the market, so equilibrium locations have been found. (To complete the description of an equilibrium, we need to let the two “share” a point and still have one on the right side and one on the left side of that point.)

This solution is commonly used as an explanation of why U.S. political parties often seem very similar to each other—they have met in the middle in the process of chasing the most voters. Political parties can’t directly buy votes, so the “price” is fixed; the only thing parties can do is locate their platform close to voters’ preferred platform, on a scale of “left” to “right.” But the same logic that a party can grab the middle, without losing the ends, by moving closer to the other party will tend to force the parties to share the same middle-of-the-road platform.

The model with constant prices is unrealistic for the study of the behavior of firms. Moreover, the two-firm model on the beach is complicated to solve and has the undesirable property that it matters significantly whether the number of firms is odd or even. As a result, we will consider a Hotelling model on a circle and let the firms choose their prices.

Link here.