The Tacit Evolution of Coordination and Strategic Outcomes in Highly Fragmented Insurgencies: Evidence from the Soviet War in Afghanistan

Abstract

Highly fragmented insurgencies often lack explicit coordination mechanisms such as plans, direct means of communication, or hierarchical organization. Many such insurgencies nevertheless obtain a high degree of coordination that produces strategic-level effects. This article presents a theory of how coordination can emerge tacitly in highly fragmented insurgencies, and how this can produce strategic-level effects. Strategic effects emerge through a combination of complementary and supplementary tactical-level actions between commonly positioned insurgent groups. The theory is then tested again evidence from the Soviet–Afghan War. The evidence presented shows that some of the Mujahidin's strategic-level effectiveness was produced through tacit coordination.

Key Words:

• Fragmented Insurgencies
• Strategic Outcomes
• Tacit Coordination
• Afghanistan
• Mujahidin
• Rural-urban Cleavage

Acknowledgements

This article was written for Jeremy Littlewood and was greatly improved by his guidance. It also benefited from several keen insights provided by Jean Daudelin and Fen Hampson, Simon Palamar, and Jenn Dumoulin. I would also thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments. Any errors, of course, are mine and mine alone.

Notes

¹Russell Hardin, One for All: The Logic of Collective Action (Princeton: Princeton UP 1995), 37.

²Nguyen Van Thieu, ‘Our Strategy for Guerrilla War’, in Gerard Chaliand (ed.), Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology from the Long March to Afghanistan (Berkeley: University of California Press 1982), 313. Emphasis added.

³T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London: Vintage Books 2008), 201. Emphasis added.

⁴Mao Tse-tung, cited in, Agnes Smedley, ‘The Red Phalanx,’ in Chaliand, Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology, 57–8.

⁵Hector Bejar, ‘The Failure of the Guerrillas in Peru,’ in Chaliand, Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology, 291. Emphasis added.

⁶Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study [1977] (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers 2009), 64–5. Emphasis added.

⁷Olivier Roy, Lessons of the Soviet/Afghan War, Adelphi Paper No. 259 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies 1991), 54. Emphasis added.

⁸Robert Kaplan, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Vintage Books 2001), 16.

⁹Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Battle for Afghanistan: The Soviets Versus the Mujahideen during the 1980s (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword 2009), 42–3. Emphasis added.

¹⁰Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: CUP 1980), 53–99.

¹¹On social cues and tacit coordination see, for example, Erik W. de Kwaadsteniet and Eric Van Dijk, ‘Social Status as a Cue for Tacit Coordination’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology46 (2010), 515–24. On the role of a common understanding in the production of tacit coordination see, for example, Eric Van Dijk, Erik W. de Kwaadsteniet, and David De Cremer, ‘Tacit Coordination in Social Dilemmas: The Importance of Having a Common Understanding’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96/3 (2009), 665–78.

¹²Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: CUP 1980), 54.

¹³Ibid.

¹⁴On boundaries between groups and the evolution of conflict see, for example, Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press 2000); Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (Long Grove: Waveland Press 1998).

¹⁵Joel M. Guttman, ‘Understanding Collective Behaviour: Matching Behaviour’, Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association 68/2 (May 1978), 251–5.

¹⁶See, for example, Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History, Vol. 1 (Lincoln, NE: Backinprint.com 2002), 564; John Coates, Suppressing Insurgency: An Analysis of the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1954 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1992), 49.

¹⁷Antonio Giustozzi, ‘The Taliban Beyond the Pashtuns,’ The Afghanistan Papers, No. 5 (July 2010), 3.

¹⁸Richard Iron, ‘Britain's Longest War: Northern Ireland, 1967–2007’, in Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian (eds), Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (New York: Osprey Publishing 2008), 167–84.

¹⁹Nguyen Van Thieu, ‘Our Strategy for Guerrilla War’, in Chaliand, Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology, 311.

²⁰Jeffery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution (New York: The Free Press 1978).

²¹Hardin, One for All.

²²For a discussion of the role of rural-urban divisions in revolutions, see, for example, John Wilson Lewis (ed.), Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia (Stanford: Stanford UP 1974).

²³For a work considering the alliance of various rurally based groups regardless of class see, for example, Odoric Y.K. Wou, Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan (Stanford: Stanford UP 1994); For a study of common alliance of rural groups across tribal and ethnic lines see Peter Dahl Thruelsen, ‘The Taliban in southern Afghanistan: a Localised Insurgency with a Local Objective’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 21/2 (2010), 259–76.

²⁴For a discussion of these patterns in Cambodia, China, and Russia, see Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge UP 2005), 318–52.

²⁵Russell Hardin, One for All: The Logic of Collective Action (Princeton: Princeton UP 1995), 37; Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1980), 54, 91.

²⁶Odoric Y.K. Wou, Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan (Stanford: Stanford UP 1994), 374.

²⁷Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare, 23.

²⁸Peter Dahl Thruelsen, ‘The Taliban in southern Afghanistan: a Localised Insurgency with a Local Objective,’ Small Wars & Insurgencies 21/2 (2010), 267.

²⁹Derek Cornish, ‘The Procedural Analysis of Offending and its Relevance for Situational Prevention’, <www.popcenter.org/library/crimeprevention/volume_03/06_cornish.pdf>.

³⁰Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (New York: Cambridge UP 2008).

³¹This definition of a ‘tactical script’ is adapted from Derek Cornish. See, for example, Cornish, ‘The Procedural Analysis of Offending and its Relevance for Situational Prevention’, 158.

³²Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley 1978), 153.

³³On the clustering of media and public figures in cities see Stathis Kalyvas, ‘The Urban Bias in Research on Civil Wars’, Security Studies 13/2 (2004), 160–90.

³⁴Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2005), 121–2.

³⁵The two insurgencies obviously have both rural and urban components, but the main locus of the insurgency in both cases was predominantly rural. See, for example, Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan, 1978-1992 (Washington, DC: Georgetown UP 2000), 10–19; Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (New York: W.W. Norton 2009); Antonio Giustozzi (ed.), Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field (New York: Columbia UP 2009).

³⁶On Pakistan's role as an external supporter of various insurgent groups in Afghanistan, see, for example, Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books 2006); Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Penguin Books 2009).

³⁷George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences, 75.

³⁸Gerard Chaliand, Report from Afghanistan, Tamar Jacoby trans. (New York: Viking Books 1982), 35.

³⁹Ibid., 36–8.

⁴⁰Ibid., 23–4, 37.

⁴¹Roy, Lessons of the Soviet/Afghan War, 12, 16.

⁴²Chaliand, Report from Afghanistan, 37–8.

⁴³On the spontaneity of the revolution see Ibid., 39, 41, 48; Roy, Lessons of the Soviet/Afghan War, 12.

⁴⁴Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress, The Soviet-Afghan War: How a SuperPower Fought and Lost (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 2002).

⁴⁵On the origins and effects of urban-biased counterinsurgency campaigns see, for example, Eric Jardine, ‘The Insurgent's Response to the Defense of Cities’, Parameters 40/3 (Autumn 2010), 103–17.

⁴⁶On some occasions, of course, a single qawn would support more than one rebel group, but the tendency was for both popular mobilization and material support to be localized and somewhat compartmentalized. See, for example, Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979to the Present (New York: Columbia UP 2005), 108–11.

⁴⁷Mark Urban, War in Afghanistan (London: Macmillan 1990), 80.

⁴⁸Stephen Tanner, Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban (Philadelphia: De Capo Press 2009), 260.

⁴⁹For a description of the operation of the seven Pesharwar parties see, for example, Yousaf and Adkin, Battle For Afghanistan, 31–43.

⁵⁰C.J. Dick, ‘Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War,’ Conflict Studies Research Centre, A102 (Jan. 2002), 6–8.

⁵¹Urban, War in Afghanistan, 250.

⁵²Eric Jardine, ‘City Gods and Village Deities: The Urban Bias in Counterinsurgency Operations’, Military Review (July–Aug. 2011), 53–61.

⁵³Tanner, Afghanistan: A Military History, 247.

⁵⁴For a detailed description of urban combat methods of the Mujahidin see, for example, Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau, Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahideen Fighters (Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press 2001), 365–96.

⁵⁵Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau, Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahideen Fighters (Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press 2001), 321.

⁵⁶Ibid.

⁵⁷Yousaf and Adkin, Battle for Afghanistan, 118–19.

⁵⁸For a detailed description of this operation see, for example, Urban, War in Afghanistan, 176–80.

⁵⁹A map of the offensive and its area is found in Urban, War in Afghanistan, 178.

⁶⁰On the distribution and non-use of radios and other communication devices to Mujahidin commanders see, for example, Yousaf and Adkin, Battle for Afghanistan, 118–19.

⁶¹The figures and details for the following analysis are all drawn from Grau and Gress, The Soviet-Afghan War, 65–70.

⁶²Jalali and Grau, Afghan Guerrilla Warfare, 69–103.

⁶³Grau and Gress, The Soviet-Afghan War, 69.

⁶⁴Yousaf and Adkin, Battle for Afghanistan, 69.

⁶⁵Ibid., 46.