The will to fight (Part II)
Scott Atran

Throughout history, the most effective combatants have powered to victory on commitment to core values and collective resolve.

Scott Atran

Scott Atran is co-founder of Artis International and emeritus director of research at France’s National Center for Scientific Research; he also holds research positions at the University of Oxford and University of Michigan, and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Talking to the Enemy (2010) and In Gods We Trust (2002).

(Continued from Part I)

Fast-forward about 50 years. Pulling my Volkswagen van to a stop in Landi Kotal at the top of the Khyber Pass in July 1976, I met two elderly men drinking tea. One was an Afridi tribesman, and the other a Waziri. They had once been tribal enemies, but no longer.

As we were talking, four young boys managed to unhinge the engine block from the back of my van and were struggling to lift it away. A soldier – a tall green-eyed Pashtun sweating in a Russian wool uniform in the very hot summer sun – stopped the boys with a stern word, shooed them away, and with a smile that showed pleasure at his command of English, threw up his hands and said: ‘Boys will be boys.’

‘Tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, bad position, bad position,’ the old Afridi tribesman sputtered as he pointed an invisible rifle at the rugged and barren hills of the Khyber Pass.

‘Why bad position?’ I asked the army man. He explained that, here, the luckless English soldiers had passed through in 1919 on their way to losing their third and last war in Afghanistan.

‘Ah, but good position [for] Nadir Khan in Kabul, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, good position,’ gleefully sputtered the man’s equally ancient tea partner, the Waziri tribesman. When I probed further, I was told that Amanullah Khan, Afghanistan’s first emir and king, once lionised for forcing the British from Afghanistan, was then deposed by an alliance of Pashtun tribes spearheaded by Nadir Khan, in good part for education policies that valued science over religion, and included girls.

The Afridi lowered his head: ‘No good position now… Bad position.’

‘Why bad position now?’ I asked.

The soldier queried the two white-bearded gentlemen and came back with a laugh: ‘They say it’s been so calm since that a man has no opportunity to become a man.’

That soon changed. Afghanistan remained independent until 1979, when the Russians (by then Soviets) returned for another go at control, followed in 2001 by the US-led invasion (with Britain as the junior partner) to bring Afghanistan into the Western camp after its brief spell of independence under Taliban control.

On 12 September 2001, Lieutenant-General Mahmood Ahmed, chief of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, tried to explain the historical context of the Taliban to the US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage. Armitage stopped him: ‘for you and for us history starts today.’ This echoed the Jacobins’ declaration that history began in Year 1 with the French Revolution, a notion repeated in our previous century by Messianic leaders such as Stalin and Mussolini.

It’s a pronouncement that leads to a political version of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. But, for the US, the method behind the madness is rooted in a consistent material rationale: with virtually limitless material assets, almost anything that is concretely conceivable is achievable, including immediate and profound sociopolitical change.

This instrumental and utilitarian view helped the US and its allies defeat and then democratise Germany and Japan. But in the past half-century, it has led to political and military fiascos in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, trillions of tax dollars spent in vain, and unfathomable injury and loss of life.

This is because the most committed ISIS fighters and others we see as fanatics do not differ significantly from those we consider the most ardent freedom-fighters of the West: all are willing to sacrifice and fight for comrade and cause. This may be an unsettling proposition to many of us who prefer to defend our own view of good over evil. But without understanding the depth of dedication felt by others, it’s almost impossible to plan effective campaigns.

Treating terrorists as criminals or nihilists can obscure the depth of their moral outrage, which helps them take a stand against any physical threat. Often in history, the critical distinction between a terrorist movement and a revolution that aims to destroy or replace entrenched power with a new or very different moral order is whether or not it wins and retains control.

The surer way forward is advancing Western democratic values through financial, media and moral alliances

When, in September 2014, the Islamic State was at the height of power after routing US-backed Iraqi government forces, despite vastly inferior manpower and no air force or heavy arms, the then US president Barack Obama endorsed the judgment of his Director of National Intelligence: ‘We underestimated the Viet Cong … we underestimated ISIL and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army … It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.’ Seven years later, after US-backed Afghan government forces were crushed by the Taliban – with no air force, heavy arms or billions spent on training – there was much the same refrain.

By failing to recognise the limits of our ability to impose values that we’ve attained only after a long history of our own, the US and its partners will continue the past half-century’s habit of building up the wrong kind of allies and armies – weakly modelled in America’s image but devoid of spirit arising from their own values and cultures, as in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The surer way forward is advancing Western democratic values by example, through financial, media and moral alliances, and using force only to defend our allies and ourselves.

Myopia regarding allies’ and adversaries’ will to fight is arguably rooted in two, somewhat interdependent, filters on reality: a utilitarian view of human behaviour as geared primarily – or at least ideally – to a rational assessment of actions aimed at minimising material costs and maximising material benefits; and a belief that maximising material benefit and human beneficence (kindness, generosity, and cooperation between individuals or groups) depends on adherence to Enlightenment values of freedom.

For instance, Western, and particularly US, national security strategies are almost exclusively based on rational deterrence through what policymakers term cost imposition. Thus, US military strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the US of 11 September 2001 was based on minimising costs in terms of lives and treasure, while imposing unsustainable costs on its adversaries. Yet the 9/11 suicide attackers held no regard for the costs of their actions, which included the sacrifice of their lives and the potential harm to their families.

Righteous belief in our own values sometimes closes us off to reality

There is also a deep-seated faith that the US can infuse other cultures with our values. Thus, after 9/11 and as a prelude to the invasion of Iraq, George W Bush introduced the 2002 National Security Strategy stating that there is but one

single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise … These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society – and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages.

The sentiment is as vainglorious as that of Iran’s then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: ‘[Muslim] religious democracy is the only path toward human prosperity and it is the most advanced type of government that humans can ever have.’

Righteous belief in our own values sometimes closes us off to reality. Our politicians and the mainstream press continually intone that Russia’s attack on Ukraine was ‘unprovoked’ but there was nary a word about the US attack on Iraq as being ‘unprovoked’ – although both Russia and the US justified their respective ‘interventions’ as ‘defensive’ operations, with similar fictions about their enemies in league with ‘terrorists’ (Nazis, Al-Qaeda) and imminent attainment and use of weapons of mass destruction.

These beliefs can cause us to underestimate others. No doubt rational utility and expansions of freedom of thought and action have been important to the US as the pre-eminent world power, to the international order it dominates, and to an increased standard of living, including expansion of the world’s middle class. But for many individuals and cultures, the forced gamble of ‘creative destruction’ of traditional ways of life via winner-take-all competition is too many degrees of freedom to accept. They find defeat of this view worth fighting for.

In fact, the values of freedom we cherish are intellectual creations of the 18th-century European and colonial American Enlightenment, and far from ‘self-evident’ in the preceding 300,000 years or so of our species’ existence (where cannibalism, slavery, infanticide, oppression or extermination of minorities, and so on, were more common fare than freedoms).

Moreover, as the Taliban leader Mullah Omar reminded the veteran journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave in June 2001, regarding equality between the sexes: ‘You forget that America and the rest of the world are centuries ahead of us. If you introduced your manners and mores suddenly in Afghanistan, society would implode and anarchy would ensue.’ In sum, successive US administrations have repeatedly overestimated the fighting spirit of foreign forces to defend our freedoms while underestimating the power of alien values to motivate willingness to fight and die, no matter the cost.

During Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Wehrmacht general Günther Blumentritt wrote in his diary:

Many of our leaders grossly underestimated this adversary … Even when surrounded, exhausted, and deprived of a chance to fight, the Russians never back down.

Although the surprise German attack initially advanced rapidly against Soviet forces, the unyielding resistance of Russia’s soldiers and people slowed the advance enough to allow the Red Army to eventually recover and ultimately triumph. Participating in the Red Army’s victory were 4 to 7 million Ukrainian fighters, including Zelensky’s grandfather (his three great-uncles perished during the Holocaust, and his grandparents burned to death in a German massacre).

Speaking this May at a military parade commemorating the 1945 Soviet Victory over Nazi Germany, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin sought to tie Russia’s old fight against Nazi Germany with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

Believing, or compelled to believe, such rhetoric, Russia’s political and military leadership continues to assess Ukraine’s will to fight, and its inspiration in shoring up the Western alliance, as a combination of ‘Nazi’ bluster and bullying, rather than ever-strengthening resolve. Ironically, Ukraine’s current tactics strongly resemble Russia’s approach at Stalingrad. Thus, whereas Russia now, like the Germans before, preferred to pummel cities with long-range artillery and aerial bombing, followed by lightning tank advances with infantry across open spaces, Ukraine’s defenders have profitably adopted the Soviet Second World War tactic of closely ‘hugging’ the enemy with small independent units operating in urban ruins to ambush and snipe at every turn. Russia’s present generals are beginning to learn the Wehrmacht’s lessons in the face of Ukraine’s resistance, which seems closer in spirit to Russia’s sacrifice in the Great Patriotic War.

Yet Russia’s initial assessment of Ukraine’s will to fight, and of Western support and steadfastness, was little different from that of the Western allies themselves. For the most part, they believed a rapid Russian victory was virtually assured, and that any serious Western military support for Ukraine or economic action against Moscow would only further fragment what the French president Emmanuel Macron, echoing the then US president Donald Trump’s claim that NATO was ‘obsolete’, considered in 2019 a nearly ‘brain dead’ NATO. Although Ukraine may ultimately cede territory to overwhelming Russian force, NATO – reinforced by Ukraine’s valiant effort – may well diminish Russia’s national security, economy (decoupled from Europe) and power.