Free War From the Ground Up by Emile Simpson Page A

original Taliban’s success at taking power in 1994–6. Whether this scenario will be repeated is perhaps a ‘known unknown’.
    Strategic thought tends to reject the idea that ‘gang warfare’ is really war. Gangs and criminals use force for direct advantage rather than within a mechanism that provides a military decision on which a political outcome is based. This is political advantage in the broad sense of an adjustment of circumstances in one’s favour, as opposed to just describing competition for state offices. Yet this is close to the way in which force is used by many actors in the war in Afghanistan, although it does not make the use of violence any less lethal.
    In the Clausewitzian paradigm of war, the enemy is coerced into subscription to one’s strategic narrative: he dies, or becomes no longer relevant. This makes the translation of force into political meaning relatively simple. Even if the enemy utilises a different interpretive structure, one can ultimately force an outcome upon him. While armed conflict continues to be at its core a clash of organised violence, the Clausewitzian notion that attack is the ‘positive’ and defence the ‘negative’ component of translating force into political meaning, a war’s ‘decision’, is compromised in Afghanistan. Ultimately the more fragmented a political environment, the more actions are interpreted individually in directly political terms rather than as part of the military balance in the scale of a conflict’s military outcome. The proliferation of strategic audiences beyond the enemy means that force no longer has a clear target: one cannot ‘force’ an outcome on a strategic audience that is not the enemy; they may well be free to ignore the war’s military outcome.
The effect of violence in fragmented political environments
    Clausewitz saw three elements at play in war: policy, passion and war’s uncertain dynamics, ‘the play of chance and probability’. He referred to this as the ‘trinity’ of war, in that these three elements formed the ‘one’, which was war. These three elements of war were for Clausewitz representedin his conception of the state at war. Reason (or policy) was represented by the government (bearing in mind that Clausewitz’s Prussia was a monarchy) and passion by the people. The army did not strictly represent war’s dynamics, but was the component of the state that had to confront the uncertainty inherent in combat. 22
    The nature of war was for Clausewitz constant, even though its character evolved. By situating war’s nature in terms of the interaction of three variables, his definition remains flexible. While the Afghan conflict is not war in an inter-state sense, its basic nature can still be comprehended in terms of an interaction of these three elements. However, unlike in conventional inter-state war (in which policy tends to be the dominant characteristic), as there are a multitude of political actors, the role of human passion, and the unpredictable, potentially explosive, dynamics of violent clash, increasingly infrom the conflict’s basic definition.
    The consequence of the use of violence in war is often that fighting generates an antagonism of its own that distances people from their political common ground. Clausewitz acknowledged this: ‘even where there is no national hatred and no animosity to start with, the fighting itself will stir up hostile feelings’. 23 Clausewitz understood violence to be an explosive, reciprocal force. The idea that ‘violence begets violence’ has always been part of human conflict; as Tacitus put it: ‘once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line’. 24 However, while the Clausewitzian paradigm recognises that violence may accentuate, or entirely generate, emotional antagonism, that antagonism is delimited by the strategic audiences’ location