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See the column at StrategyPage.

NOTE: The entire Blog Week In Review interview is now up at PajamasMedia.com

Dr. David Kilcullen serves as General David Petraeus’ chief adviser on counter-insurgency warfare. A former Australian infantry officer thoroughly versed in the cultural and historical contexts that that shape people’s perceptions and influence their opinions, Kilcullen assesses the cultural implications of Coalition “words and deeds” (political and military operations). He’s a genuine soldier-scholar.

Kilcullen appears this week on PajamasMedia.com’s “Blog Week In Review” internet program, which I host.

The interview is forty minutes long and is as complex as it is long. Kilcullen thinks and talks in paragraphs.

Ed Driscoll produces Blog Week In Review and I asked Ed to extract a five minute segment where Kilcullen talks about the split between Al Qaeda in Iraq and Anbar Province’s Sunni tribes. I transcribed that segment for the blog. Welcome to 21st century warfare, where knowing your enemy includes knowing his myths and marriage mores as well as his political goals and military capabilities.

David Kilcullen:

The Al Qaeda narrative and I’m putting that Al Qaeda globally here, is one about a Golden Age of Islamic greatness, during the time of the Pious Ancestors, what they call the Salafis, The Pious Ancestors. That’s where the term Salafist comes from, incidentally.

And they believe that this Golden Age was overthrown and fragmented by non-Islamic empires, and the reason for that was that Muslims walked away from a complete purity of practice and thought.

And now what‘s happening in this narrative is that the Umma, the global population of Muslims, is going to unite. It’s going to rise up through a global guerrilla struggle. And in fact, Ayman al Zawahiri who’s primarily the major Al Qaeda ideologue, actually wrote a paper about this. About how the method was going to be fast moving, lightly equipped guerrilla forces that operated across the world This whole global guerrilla idea. That there’d be a great clash of civilizations and that God would provide the victory. And it’s a pan-Islamic, neo-Salafist narrative. Incidentally there isn’t a huge amount of Islam there. You know I just showed you that it follows a very similar pattern for the Nazis, the Christians, the Communists. It’s a pretty standard form. And of course it also draws a number of concepts from European thinking. You know the idea of globalization, the idea of the clash of civilizations, notions of guerrilla struggle. These things aren’t fundamentally Islamic. They are, in fact, part of a post-modern view of the world.

And it’s important to realize that that doesn’t matter that much, you know. When you step into a cultural stream of narratives, it has a charge of its own, it carries you along and gives your ideas and your words greater force. When you step out of that mainstream, then you lose impetus, and if you are going against the current, the cultural Zeitgeist if you like, then your ideas and words will have much weaker effects.

Now the enemy gets that. Let me give you some operational examples.

Let me start with the Taliban. The Taliban puts propaganda first. You know, and propaganda is just Latin for propagating. And what are they propagating? They are propagating this narrative. And they put that first, and they craft physical operations to support propaganda offensives.

So we have examples of Taliban senior leadership talking to junior Taliban commanders and saying, no, I don’t want you to do that operation, I want you to do this operation, because it better supports the message that we’re trying to put forward.

So they’re designing their physical operations, whether it be terrorism or insurgency, primarily to support a story that we’re telling. And it’s about Pashtun nationalism. It’s about the rebirth Ghilzais tribal confederation and triumphing over the Durranis who’ve kept them down for centuries. It’s about tapping into a broader notion of the clash of civilizations which they’ve got from their allies in Al Qaeda. So that’s the sort of Taliban approach

Al Qaeda in Iraq –their approach is founded on the notion of religious identity and it taps into the broader Al Qaeda narrative of the clash of civilizations that we spoke about.

And if you’d have summarized the Al Qaeda narrative in one sentence, it would be that they went and pitched the Sunni, and this a narrative directed at Sunni populations, we are Sunni, you’re Sunni, the Americans are helping the Shia, let’s fight them together.

And they talked about, you know, they appealed to the old establishment, and said you know this has been a Sunni dominated country for a thousand years, you know Baghdad city of Harun Rashid, city of Abbasid caliphates, are you really going to let those Shia dogs take it over?

And they appealed to a traditional identity that was founded in religious identity.

Now this narrative has actually broken down for Al Qaeda, and it broke down because of the conflict, or the contrast between two key elements we see in Iraqi thinking. What you might call adat, which is tradition or custom. And deen, which is religion.

And what essentially happened was that the Al Qaeda went and made this argument to tribes, the tribes initially supported them, but tribal identity is not the same thing as religious identity. And there are things in Islam that the tribes don’t support and vice versa.

And there came at a time that Al Qaeda fell out with the tribes. And that’s the reason for what we are seeing in Al Anbar and other places in the country. And it boiled down to a conflict over women, as so many of these things do.

Al Qaeda basically went to their tribal allies and said give us your daughter or give us your sister in marriage.

And in tribal adat, in tribal custom, you don’t allow outsiders from outside the tribe to marry you daughter, I mean not on a regular basis. Sometimes tribes exchange wives in marriage for allies. So this is a bit like Renaissance kings, they are a lot like that in lots of ways, but they just don’t willy nilly give their women away to outsiders. Al Qaeda said, no, you know the Koran says that sort of behavior is ignorant and ungodly. So basically, no, you will us your daughters to marry them.

This came to a head. Al Qaeda killed a tribal leader. This produced a blood feud. The tribes started fighting them. They killed a number of sons of tribal leaders and the whole thing snowballed from there

So this is a classic example of Al Qaeda picking a narrative that worked for awhile, but it didn’t actually tap into people’s deepest level of identity. It only tapped into the level of religious, sectarian belief, which in Iraq is only one of many strands of identity and I would argue not the deepest. And I am not saying this as an outsider but I’m just quoting from what Iraqis have told me.

So now Al Qaeda’s got a new narrative, which they’ve tried to introduce this year, and it’s more of a threat narrative. And it essentially says, the Americans are coming and we’re going to have to leave this district but if you support the Americans we’ll know about it but when we come back we’re going to kill you.

So it’s a narrative that says this American thing is temporary. We’re coming back. The future belongs to us and we are going to take you back.

Now, this is where the gap between what is said and what is done becomes important.
For the narrative isn’t just a story, it’s a story backed up by action.

And so we are breaking that narrative down by proving to the people that we actually can protect them, and we’re also proving to them that although the US is not going to stay in Iraq forever, we are handing over to an Iraqi government that has their best interests at heart and can protect them from the terrorists. And we have those measures in place we’ve talked about some of those to make that happen.

But it’s about proving the lie against Al Qaeda. And saying you know what Al Qaeda said they were going to come back and kill you if you supported us. Well hang on, those Al Qaeda guys that threatened you they’re dead now. So what weight does that trick carry?

Well we say, Al Qaeda told you we couldn’t protect you. But now we have local Sunni neighborhood watches working closely with us, defending your own homes and villages. What’s the angle for Al Qaeda to get back in?

So we’re trying to show you that Al Qaeda talks the talk but they don’t walk the walk That’s an important part of breaking down the narrative.

Once again, Kilcullen interview last forty minutes or so and will be up on the www.pajamasmedia.com site later today.

UPDATE: A soldier serving overseas, after reading this weeks column about Al Qaeda, writes via email:

You highlight the IO nature of this campaign. We conduct ops, sometimes with a PSYOP line of operation. The bad guys conduct 4GW (IO with a military component) to influence our decision makers. We are very good at tactical PSYOP (TPTs, print, Commando Solo, etc) but generally suck at achieving a consonance betwen our message and our actions at the operational and strategic levels. We do NOT adhere to our narrative. And so we are losing… or stalemated, at best.

I rarely post emails and emails have to meet the same criteria as comments. Emails also are subject to editing. I chop out personal remarks.

UPDATE 2: RIchard Fernandez at The Blemont Club weighs in on “interpretations” of the War on Terror.

Great quote:

At all events it is unlikely, now that the Internet has broadened the policy forum, that anyone will be given the chance to politically interpret recent events without opposition. But the main rebuttals will come, not from neo-conservatives, whoever they may be, but from events. The book will not close with Iraq, any more than the war on fascism closed with the Spanish civil war.

The problem with declaring an Iraq War syndrome is precisely that the war isn’t with Iraq, and hence makes about as much sense as declaring a post-Guadalcanal War syndrome. The conflict is at least with al-Qaeda and the the theocrats in Iran or so those worthies themselves think. When an post al-Qaeda War syndrome can be studied, that will be the time to look back. And not before.